In the film that won her Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, Kirsten Dunst plays a bride haunted by depression in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia. Nihilistic thoughts overwhelm our heroine and push her to the brink. Perhaps the dream wedding at a castle with a dashing husband is nothing more than a facade. Toxic divorced parents, an insufferable boss, and a sense of impending doom are more than she can bear. But the knowledge of a planet's imminent collision with Earth is strangely calming. Meanwhile, her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who is the mother of a young child, spirals in the face of total annihilation. Inspired by his own bout with depression, von Trier epitomisesthe darkness of his inner world in arguably his most accessible film. Dunst finds herself at the height of her powers at the hands of a filmmaker who is renowned for his portrayal of the troubled female psyche.

Lars von Trier (b. 1956, Denmark) stunned the film world with his debut feature film The Element of Crime in 1984, winning over audiences and film festivals with his idiosyncratic take on film noir. In 1995, he and fellow Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg co-founded the Dogme 95 movement with a manifesto that shunned studio sets, lighting, non-diegetic sound, and special effects, among other common modern filmmaking practices. Inspired by von Trier’s own Breaking the Waves (1996), Dogme 95 attempts to strip cinema of what it deems as non-essential and artificial, turning the focus to the fundamentals of the medium. Von Trier contributed The Idiots (1998) to the movement as filmmakers around the world responded to Dogme 95 with their own films. The director has since continued to draw controversy with his public statements and films such as Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), and Nymphomaniac (2013).