The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference, and in Lars von Trier’s film it’s the awesome force of Kirsten Dunst’s depression-fueled disinterest that exudes a gravitational drag on everyone around here even before the arrival of the destructive planet of the title. Before the breathtaking apocalyptic imagery appears — the object looming closer in the sky, the static sparking from fingertips — Melancholia is already a devastating look at an illness that leaves you unable to connect to what life has to offer, even on an extravagant wedding day that seems to compress half a lifetime into a night. But it’s that the film turns to offer a sympathetic eye to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s anxious sibling in the second half that makes it great, and that gives it a soul. As she struggles to hold everything together in the face of approaching disaster, even Dunst’s depressive is moved to offer her a conciliatory gesture as the world ends.
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