Depression eclipses the wider world in stunning Melancholia

• Nordisk Film
• THE FLOATAWAY BRIDE: Kirsten Dunst in ‘Melancholia’

Hamlet has long been known has the melancholy Dane, but maybe it’s time he passed to the torch to Danish director Lars von Trier. The Shakespearean prince’s thoughts of self-slaughter with a bare bodkin scarcely compare to von Trier’s cinematic sequences of genital mutilation in Antichrist or the apocalyptic visions of his latest film, Melancholia, now screening at Landmark Midtown Art Cinema and also available on demand.

Melancholia’s opening shot could summarize von Trier’s bleak aesthetic. We see Kirsten Dunst in close-up, her beauty masked in a kind of sullen desolation, and in the background, dead birds tumble dreamily from the sky. The film continues with a kind of overture of similar shots, slowed down to almost resemble still paintings and accompanied by the familiar strains of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde.” Dunst in a wedding dress trudges through black webbing, Charlotte Gainsbourg carries a boy across a golf course, a horse collapses, a Brueghel painting ignites and another planet dwarfs Earth in the heavens.

Where Terence Malick used cosmology in The Tree of Life to provide a context for human moral evolution, von Trier’s rogue planet — which happens to be named “Melancholia” — serves as a simpler metaphor for both debilitating personal depression and any catastrophe that threatens rich Western complacency. While von Trier can still seem befuddled by or indifferent to credible human behavior, Melancholia crafts such intriguing situations and powerful visuals that it’s impossible to dismiss.