Melancholia.

Melancholia, ostensibly an apocoliptic vision of earth being mauled by a larger, rogue planet from which the movie takes its name, is also a plaintive, and frequently painful examination of depression, circumstances unavoidable and coping mechanisms that stem from the characters' mental states. This new Lars Von Trier film is worth a piece of anyone's time, and is unlike anything I have ever seen in a theater, and that includes Ice Age 3.

Kirsten Dunst, sisters with Charlotte Gainsbourge, captures despair frighteningly well, in a role that was likely more than a little challenging than anything in Spiderman. Which isn't to say the movie is an unendurable dirge from glum to glummer. Parts of it are wickedly funny, and the inclusion of Keifer Sutherland as Dunst's father-in-law make for welcome, if unintended comic relief. Yes, a planet crashes into earth, but this isn't an end-of-days picture complete with a soundtrack scored by Aerosmith. It's the proportional inverse: The movie's settings are localized within the titular characters, in a mansion by an eighteen-hole golf course, as in times of crisis, action and energy are withdrawn where they're most useful. The individual human response is the only one that matters when it's the individual's life that's at stake.

A few important directorial choices stood out for me: First, the opening scene, at Dunst's wedding, is disorienting, the camera making frequent pans from scene to scene, establishing a sense of her nauseating, blurred descent into the depths of mental instability. Secondly, between act one's wedding and act two's oncoming destruction, Dunst deteriorates horribly to immobility, which Von Trier implies happened quickly. Finally and most crucially, each of the director's characters are portrayed with sympathetic complexity, neither elevating nor debasing any of them to crude sketches of the mental archetypes common to those unfamiliar with the often infuriating nature of true, unremitting depression and despair. It might have been easier to reduce the characters to a way in which audiences could either love or despise them, since it's human nature to crave such simplistic categorizations. It is to Von Trier's, and his casts' immense credit, that his characters are human beings, in all their awful bliss.

See the movie with an open-mind, and spend the evening wondering how well you, or anybody you know, would handle imminent catastrophe with the dignity your life requires. Most of us probably imagine ourselves as courageous and valiant, able to think rationally during life's toughest throes, but that in itself is a comforting reduction we instill on ourselves in times of fallacious bravado so thin that the ego itself is compelled to erect some, any kind of support. When the movie ended, the movie theater was quiet; no giggling, no applause, no reaction except the stunned silence befitting having witnessed something truly provocative.