Lars von Trier’s Melancholia is neither the provocation nor the yowl of anguish that his last picture, Antichrist , was. For those reasons, it’s less effective and also far less of a workout: Antichrist was the first von Trier movie I genuinely loved, after a decade’s worth of railing against the sufferdome atmosphere of pictures like Dogville , Dancer in the Dark , and even the mildly bearable Breaking the Waves . Antichrist stunned and upset me, but it also filled me with compassion toward the man who made it, a feeling I’d never imagined I could have. The gift of Antichrist — with its horrific depictions of emotional suffering, its wailing-wind subtext of “Nature is everywhere, inside you and outside, and it is not your friend” — was that von Trier had surprised me. That is a critic’s greatest pleasure — or at least it’s mine.
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REVIEW: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia Offers a Glorious Peep into the Sugar Easter Egg of Doom
