In retrospect, it’s fitting that Melancholia was released just a few months before the dawn of 2012. Long pinpointed as a possible date for the end of the world as we know it, 2012 had apocalyptic enough connotations to inspire a bona fide Roland Emmerich disaster movie three years earlier: 2012, which sits on the timeline between the lesser The Day After Tomorrow and the great Moonfall of 2022.
Melancholia, which leaves Netflix after this weekend (and is also available on some free services including Pluto TV), is not a Roland Emmerich film. It hails from Lars von Trier, the Danish provocateur who previously dissected musicals with Dancer in the Dark and American melodrama with Dogville, among other bold downers. Melancholia is among his boldest and best, a sci-fi disaster movie with an apocalyptic grimness some viewers will feel in their bones.
In some ways, Melancholia takes the next step from Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, a more traditional (by comparison) sci-fi disaster picture released in 2005, though it seems unlikely that von Trier would describe it that way (or feel as positively about the Spielberg film as Bong Joon Ho does). That movie arrived in the wake of 9/11 and as the ‘90s-era disaster-movie craze started to fade, bringing a more visceral sense of reality to scenes of CG-assisted destruction. Melancholia has very few scenes of destruction at all, as it moves further away from the game-like vision of Earth swallowing up large chunks of its population. Rather than, say, packing into a car and improbably zipping through a collapsing city (as happens in Emmerich’s 2012), Melancholia takes place entirely at a country estate, its beauty and relative quiet serving as an eventual counterpoint to the movie’s world-ending disaster.
It takes a while to get there. In the film’s first section, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) arrives at the estate owned by her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Claire’s husband John (Kiefer Sutherland), following her wedding to Michael (Alexander Skarsgård). During the reception, Justine reverts to a depressive state that she has apparently battled before. In the second section, set an unspecified amount of time later, Justine returns to the estate, her depression more severe than ever, as the family learns of a “rogue planet” called Melancholia that is expected to narrowly miss a collision with Earth. There are menacing signs, however, that the planets may actually collide, ending all life.
Melancholia hinges on a simple but brilliant conceit that ultimately diverges it further from the more subtle deconstruction of disaster-movie staples in War of the Worlds. Justine’s clinical depression leaves her the only member of her family fully prepared for the end of the world. As panic rises, her grimness takes on an almost superheroic dimension. She is perfectly equipped to deal with the worst possible crisis because her mental state has been preparing for the worst for years. It is not surprising to learn that von Trier was inspired by his own depressive episode. This 130-minute apocalyptic chamber drama is not the sort of movie typically made on a lark.
As such, Melancholia is the rare movie that could change a viewer’s entire relationship with the genre it (sort of) inhabits. It makes sense that we might consume apocalypse-themed entertainment as a way to grapple with our own fears in the safe space of a movie theater or a living room. Yet it can also feel perverse to derive entertainment from the slightly-off-screen deaths of millions or billions of people. That’s the reality a movie like 2012 studiously avoids, even as the filmmakers help themselves to the would-be gravity of world-ending stakes. In that context, Justine is almost a parody of the unflappable hero who may drop their jaw at crazy apocalyptic sights, but ultimately keeps cool enough to save themselves and their family. Her stoicism in the face of disaster can help those around her, in a way, but not by improbably selecting them as the chosen few who get to try out one of humanity’s patented life-saving arks.
This is a turning-point role for Dunst, who brings a sense of melancholy to plenty of mainstream roles before this one — even Mary Jane Watson in the original Spider-Man trilogy — but feels transformed in her films following Melancholia. Girlish love-interest roles like her part in Elizabethtown suddenly seemed like an odd fit. (Weirdly, Dunst made another movie of near-colliding worlds in close proximity to this one, with Upside Down, the vastly more optimistic and fairly stupid sci-fi romance from… 2012!) In addition to her own tastes for complex movies like The Power of the Dog or Civil War, it’s probably difficult to return to CG building-smashing after immersing yourself in a movie like this one.
Viewers might well bounce back from Melancholia and continue to enjoy the welcome paradox of lighter apocalypse-themed entertainment. Regardless, von Trier’s movie is a haunting experience, its images emphasizing an eerie glow over typical world-ending imagery. (This is true even as the danger feels more imminent in the final stretch.) Yet however allegorical its science fiction is, Melancholia does what the genre is supposed to do: It asks big questions about what it means to be human in the most extraordinary of situations.