Critics reviews

At that end, "unhappy" proves an adequate qualifier, given the gloomy forecast for all mankind, yet it doesn't sum up the spectacular visions, the emotional crescendos, or the golden mean achieved by Dunst and Gainsbourg, all of which meet their natural zenith under the glow of MELANCHOLIA. Not something to watch, so much as to behold. 

Melancholia is a long day’s journey into night that merges the beauty and horror of depression through its committed point of view, full-bodied performances, and precise visual sensibility.

[Von Trier] brings his vision of human annihilation to the screen in this visually stunning, thematically rich, perversely humorous, and sublimely virtuosic film. Melancholia is the best film of [the director's] storied career.

There’s something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching Melancholia. I’ll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget. For days after seeing it, I could call up the sense memory of its sickly green color palette and histrionic Wagner score.

Von Trier suffers from bouts of depression, and few films have more accurately captured both its paralyzing effects and the immense frustration of those who care about the afflicted.

[A] daunting and delirious, poignant and problematic, borderline-brilliant film... It’s a huge idea, the end of the world, and visually rewarding as anything in modern movie creation, but it falls flat in behavioral acuity. The characters often seem stick figures for the author’s views: that logic is crippling, and disability a special gift.

A potent beauty of a film... [in which Dunst's] incomparable performance, a slow accumulation of moods from despair to euphoria, never strikes a false note... Von Trier draws us inexorably into the web of these characters. He loses us in a dream of his own devising. That’s filmmaking.

“Melancholia” is emphatically not what anyone would call a feel-good movie, and yet it nonetheless leaves behind a glow of aesthetic satisfaction. Total obliteration happens on an intimate scale, and the all-encompassing, metaphysical nature of the drama leaves room for gentleness as well as operatic cruelty.

Melancholia’s first five minutes are like a formal invitation to the end of the world; the next 130 minutes allow you to live through the run-up.

Melancholia is his latest pile of undiluted drivel, nauseatingly filmed by a wonky hand-held camera and featuring a crazy, mismatched ensemble headed by Kirsten Dunst, who won an acting award in Cannes last year for looking totally catatonic.

[Melancholia's] sights are wondrous to behold, and, in their embodiment of Stygian souls, they leave the rest of the movie looking superfluous.

[Melancholia] is a lyrical ode to the end of the world... The vision is as hateful as it is hate-filled, but the fusion of form and content is so perfect that it borders on the sublime... [It] is a raw psychodrama with the unnerving drone of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, its angst giving birth to the ultimate cosmic correlative. It’s a great, awful movie, a nihilist masterwork that settles over you like a shroud.