Melancholia

Lars von Trier's Melancholia opened at Cannes 2011 and won Kirsten Dunst the Best Actress prize. The film's reception was complicated by Trier's notorious Cannes press-conference incident, in which his attempted-comic remarks about Hitler led to his being banned from the festival as persona non grata. Dunst's prize was awarded over the controversy. The film is the second of Trier's loose Depression Trilogy after Antichrist (2009) and before Nymphomaniac (2013).

Two sisters (Justine (Kirsten Dunst), suffocating with severe depression, and her older sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), gripped by anxiety) face the slow approach of a rogue planet (Melancholia) that has emerged from behind the sun on what astronomers have predicted is a near-miss flyby of Earth. The film is structured in two named chapters (Justine, Claire) each centred on one of the sisters and her psychological response to the approaching celestial event. Kiefer Sutherland plays Claire's husband John; Charlotte Rampling plays the sisters' bitter mother.

The film opens with an extended slow-motion prologue set to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde prelude, with the sustained orchestral motif returning across the runtime. Manuel Alberto Claro's photography of the Swedish-castle-and-grounds setting, Trier's commitment to handheld realism in the central chapters and to baroque slow-motion in the framing sequences, and Dunst's central performance combine into one of the most distinctive recent works of European art-genre cinema.