Melancholia

Melancholia is certainly the most beautiful film by the polarizing Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, and it may be his best picture yet. The movie concerns grief and hopelessness, emotional states that are difficult enough to be around in real life, let alone the claustrophobic confines of a Lars von Trier film. But as harrowing as the picture is at times, it is also spellbinding. Unlike so many of von Trier’s pictures, which force the audience to submit to the filmmaker’s uncompromising will and brutally dark view of the world, Melancholia feels like a film to which the director was in thrall, allowing it to take him and the audience wherever it wanted on the path to its inevitable conclusion.

Kirsten Dunst, in her finest performance yet, creates a character that is so externally beautiful and so internally pained that it perfectly conveys to the viewer actual feelings of depression as well as what it feels like to care about someone in this state. The rest of the cast is also excellent, including Charlotte Gainsboug, star of the other films in von Trier’s proposed “Depression Trilogy,” of which this would be the middle picture. Von Trier allows her to play all over the emotional spectrum of concern and fear, rather than limiting her to the same repeated note as he did in his previous film, Antichrist.

Despite the film's grim subject matter, there is something thrilling and life-affirming about it. It is about the end of existence—or at least the desire for the end of existence—but faced with that we get to experience of how beautiful and precious life is at such a heightened sensory state. The film begins with one of von Trier’s signature opening sequences in which he abandons his usual Dogma, shaky-cam style and presents a glorious visual and musical representation of the movie through stunning imagery and the music of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. The picture concludes with a literal apocalypse that is equally glorious. I saw the film in the Lincoln Plaza Cinema, which is not renowned for its sound system, but the sound design at the close of the film is so intense and so seamlessly joined with the images on screen that for a few seconds I felt utterly transported, almost as if I was experiencing the end of the world myself. My second watch in a far better-equipped cinema confirmed that this effect was a fluke but rather a truly exceptional achievement in sound design as well as narrative.