As the film's cinematographer Manuel Alberto Claro explains, some images for the film were storyboarded by Von Trier in painterly detail, homaging other artworks – like Millais' Ophelia, in a vision of Justine floating in a stream in her wedding dress – or arising from its creator's dreams. What makes it especially unusual for a film that is centrally about despair is its visual splendour. Meanwhile John reveals himself as a coward – the situation, it is suggested, has shaken the truth about everyone to the surface. Her lucidity stems from her despair, which in the face of imminent obliteration, scans like existential courage and a capacity to face the truth. We don't need to grieve for it," she says.
However 'Part Two: Claire' flips the script: now, with Melancholia coming ever closer and an apocalypse imminent, the focus is on Claire's mounting anxiety, which contrasts with Justine who, in the grip of depression, calmly accepts their fate. From here, everything goes downhill as Justine's depression engulfs the day to the heartbreak of Michael, dismay of sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and cold incomprehension of filthy rich brother-in-law John (Kiefer Sutherland). Justine and Michael eventually arrive two hours late to their reception.
The focus of "Part One: Justine" is Justine's wedding day: as the film opens, we are in a stretch-limousine with Justine and her new husband Michael (Alexander Skarsgård), both giggling as their driver tries to make an impossible turn on a narrow country road. It centres on a young woman, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) – Von Trier's surrogate – who experiences a debilitating depression just as the literal end of the world is nigh, with a blue planet, the titular Melancholia, looming in the sky and set to hit Earth. "A psychological disaster movie" and "a beautiful movie about the end of the world" is how Von Trier described Melancholia at the time of its release. In fact, Melancholia is the second in Von Trier's so-called depression trilogy, which also included Antichrist and Nymphomaniac: through all three, he purported to be exploring different manifestations of his own experience of depression using female alter-egos. However, now the dust has settled, it deserves to be recognised as an enduring masterpiece, one that came ahead of the cultural discourse's current reckoning with our mental health crisis, and depicted how mental illness can transform the human soul with full-bore cinematic power. Ten years ago, this month, the film premiered in Cannes and was immediately mired in controversy when, in the press conference following its first screening, Von Trier said he was a Nazi, causing him to be banned from the festival for seven years.
– The struggle to portray dementia on screen But, amid all these problematic portrayals, arguably no film has been more profoundly compassionate in its depiction of a mental crisis than Lars von Trier's 2011 film Melancholia. Whether depression or something more serious, mental illness has typically been portrayed in a way that is either exploitative, stigmatising or both: most reprehensibly, perhaps, it is still often used as a catalyst for violence, such as in Todd Phillips' recent Joker (2019). In cinema, the bar for what passes as mental-health representation has always been low.