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Suffering — predominantly, though not exclusively, the suffering of women — is both his favorite subject and his preferred method. He is a crafty sadist, but also, for all his tricks and provocations, a sincere one.

Total obliteration happens on an intimate scale, and the all-encompassing, metaphysical nature of the drama leaves room for gentleness as well as operatic cruelty

The machinery of mass panic and media frenzy that juices up most films on this subject is notably absent. Instead, difficult emotions are registered in close-ups of individual human faces, and a perverse, persuasive idea rises to the surface. The end of the world as we know it might just turn out to be beautiful.

Compared with the humorless, grimly responsible Claire, Justine is impulsive, self-indulgent and charming: the flighty grasshopper to her sister’s responsible, dutiful ant.

In the second half of the movie Justine’s fatalism will prove a more viable (or at least a more graceful) response to the prospect of global annihilation than Claire’s anxious practicality

the imminence of an all-obliterating big bang is a piece of information the audience possesses in advance of the characters on screen, an open secret that makes their earnest, trivial doings all the more dreadful and absurd.

Robert Altman, Noah Baumbach and Jonathan Demme might come to mind during the first hour of “Melancholia,” to say nothing of the houses of Windsor and Kardashian.

English is the language, and dollars are the currency, but this is less a specific America (a place Mr. von Trier has never visited and the theoretical location of most of his recent films) than an abstract space of moneyed entitlement.

Unlike other von Trier victim-heroines — including those played by Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves”; Nicole Kidman in “Dogville”; and Bjork in “Dancer in the Dark” — Justine is not assailed and humiliated by other people. The element of male aggression that was such a powerful force in those films, and an integral aspect of Mr. von Trier’s creative personality, has been neutralized here. The men who hover around the wedding, including the clueless Michael and the officious John, are not menacing, just useless.

All of which, of course, amounts to nothing, since everything and everyone will be ashes soon enough. That is Justine’s state of mind, and Ms. Dunst is remarkably effective at conveying both the acute anguish and the paralyzing hollowness of depression. To the extent that the destructive potential of Melancholia is a metaphor for her private melancholia, it is perfectly apt. One of the chief torments of serious depression is how disproportionate and all-consuming the internal, personal sorrow can feel.

There is a grim vindication — and also an obvious, effective existential joke — in Justine’s discovery that her hyperbolic despair may turn out to be rooted in an accurate and objective assessment of the state of the universe. Mr. von Trier, inspired (if that’s the word) to make this movie by his own experience of depression, gleefully turns a psychological drama inside out. The world, Justine declares in her darkest moment of clarity, deserves its awful fate. The perverse achievement of “Melancholia” is how difficult it is to argue with her conclusion.

As Melancholia’s Justine, though, she does an impressive swan dive

Gainsbourg shatters Claire's careful mask of calm to show the raging insecurities beneath, prompted by concern for her young son and her husband's pompous insistence that disaster will be averted.

Von Trier draws us inexorably into the web of these characters. He loses us in a dream of his own devising.

As for the approaching interplanetary disaster, this does not appear to affect the tides or the weather – there is just this big CGI planet hovering above – and it does not occur to anyone to turn on the TV and find out what's going on. Justine and Claire just carry on with the translated dialogue and the sedated acting, greeting Melancholia with glassy-eyed anxiety and mumbling resentment. Claire's husband, incidentally, is finally found face down in the stables: perhaps he has topped himself or just expired with boredom.

Von Trier has written and directed an entire film in his trademark smirk mode: a giggling aria of pretend pain and faux rapture. The script is clunking, and poor Dunst joins Nicole Kidman and Bryce Dallas Howard in the list of Hollywood females who have sleepwalked trustingly through a Von Trier production

Perhaps this movie is another symptom of the director's much-discussed depression, or a kind of therapy that involves transferring his depression to the audience.

Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work

Kirsten Dunst, who deservedly took home a 2011 award at the Cannes Film Festival for her magnificent work

Claire (a soulful Charlotte Gainsbourg)

Melancholia is also the name of a planet that is hurtling on a catastrophic collision course with Earth on the very same day — a cosmic manifestation of that same crushing sadness

he sets aside all trickster impulses of provocation to create striking visual tableaux that, in their majestic simplicity, convey a profound emotional depth that transcends words

known to have survived a black depression himself.

The filmmaker blends the grand romanticism of Wagnerian music — specifically the famous prelude from Tristan und Isolde — with swooning dreamscape cinematography that magically melts sight and sound into one. (Von Trier has said that Antonioni, Bergman, and Tarkovsky are among his influences.