Thursday, November 10, 2011

Melancholia

This premiered last night on HD Movies, and was actually pretty good. It opens in theatres this Friday.
 
Written and directed by the controversial Hitler-wannabe Lars Von Trier, it focuses on two sisters (played by Kirsten Dunst, who really has evolved as an actress, and Charlotte Gainsbourg) and how they react to the end of the world in a collision with a rogue planet that looks suspicious Earth-like.
 
Visually, the film is stunning and it's really hard to balance the overall impending crisis on such a large scale with the small-scale claustrophobia of the family. Von Trier does a pretty spectacular job of it, especially as you know how the story must end. The isolation of these four people (Kiefer Sutherland plays a brother-in-law to Dunst, and Gainsbourg has a son), combined with the emotional instability of Dunst's character, Justine, make for a nice combination of "inner reflection, outer panic" that plays our beautifully.