MELANCHOLIA [2011] movie review
January 7, 2012 · Print This Article
I think director Lars von Trier has been making movies that have had the most impact on me in the last 15 years, at least from an emotional sense. He pulls from his actors such raw emotion. MELANCHOLIA features two sisters with the most unusual emotional problems. I think MELANCHOLIA is as far out there as a movie can be without become insane just for insane’s sake. It still remains a movie, but absolutely not like any I have seen before. It is perhaps the most claustrophobic and isolating movie not set in a cave ever made. I am not even sure I liked MELANCHOLIA, but the fact it has made me feel makes it a success.
I can guess that some people just walked out on MELANCHOLIA during its first ten minutes of bizarre scene montage. Then the most doomed wedding reception takes up at least the next 30 minutes of the film, so much time that you think the rest of the movie will just be about it. Not so.
Kirsten Dunst is the bride who is very loved by her new husband, but is possibly the saddest woman on the planet. We eventually learn why she may be so sad. When she simply tells her sister (paraphrasing), “life on Earth is evil” and that, “we are the only life in the universe,” I, myself, felt incredibly alone and despaired in my own heart. It seems to be true.
There is real reason for fear as some planet that has been hidden by the Sun is now going to whizz right by Earth, but not hit it, according to scientists.
Yet this is no disaster movie by any means, or at least it is the most isolated and disconnected disaster movie you can imagine. Dunst’s sister lives in a huge estate in the countryside seemingly off the grid, save for the occasional browsing of a website that looks like it was from 1996. No TV on, no radio, not outside news at all. This would be strange any time, even more so when a potential planet destroying planet is swinging by any day now.
Lars von Trier has made another movie that I will never forget.
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