Melancholia is a 2011 science fiction drama film written and directed by Lars von Trier and starring Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Kiefer Sutherland, with Alexander Skarsgård, Brady Corbet, Cameron Spurr, Charlotte Rampling, Jesper Christensen, John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgård, and Udo Kier in supporting roles.

Justine and Michael are late for the reception due to their stretch limousine's difficulty traversing the narrow and winding rural road.

Justine's employer Jack, who announces her promotion to art director of his advertising firm, expects her to write a slogan for a new campaign during the celebration.

Toward the end of the party, which goes on until the early hours of the morning, she quits her job in an argument and calls off her marriage to Michael after raping her new co-worker on the golf course.

Early the following morning, while horse riding with Claire, Justine notices Antares is no longer visible in the sky.

Some time later, Justine arrives at John and Claire's estate, having sunk even further into depression, where she struggles to leave her bed and is unable to eat.

Claire looks anxiously at Melancholia's path on the internet, learning of a theory that, having bypassed the Earth, it will turn back and collide with it.

The electricity in the castle goes out, the butler does not come to work, the horses in the stable are restless, St. Elmo's fire is seen at various times, and the weather changes erratically.

While Justine and Leo seem apathetic to, or at peace with, their impending doom, Claire panics and lets go, succumbing to her despair.

It is the second entry in von Trier's unofficially titled "Depression Trilogy", preceded by Antichrist and followed by Nymphomaniac.

[12] The idea for the film originated during a therapy session Lars von Trier attended during treatments for his depression.

A therapist had told von Trier that depressive people tend to act more calmly than others under heavy pressure, because they already expect bad things to happen.

Von Trier decided from the outset that it would be clear from the beginning that the world would actually end in the film, so audiences would not be distracted by the suspense of not knowing.

The concept of the two sisters as main characters developed via an exchange of letters between von Trier and the Spanish actress Penélope Cruz.

As von Trier subsequently tried to write a role for the actress, the two maids from the play evolved into the sisters Justine and Claire in Melancholia.

[16] Melancholia was produced by Denmark's Zentropa, with co-production support from its subsidiary in Germany, Sweden's Memfis Film, France's Slot Machine, and Liberator Productions.

Dunst had been suggested for the role by the American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson in a discussion about the film between him and von Trier.

[22] Von Trier employed his usual directing style with no rehearsals; instead the actors improvised and received instructions between the takes.

"[2] Von Trier explained that the visual style he aimed at in Melancholia was "a clash between what is romantic and grand and stylized and then some form of reality", which he hoped to achieve through the hand-held camerawork.

(Von Trier may have conflated this six-page passage with the much lengthier one in the same volume given over to the narrator’s thoughts during a performance of the imaginary Septet by Vinteuil, which does refer to some of Wagner’s later works (specifically Tristan, Rheingold, and Meistersinger) as “masterpieces .

Poland's Platige Image, which previously had worked with von Trier on Antichrist, created most of the effects seen in the film's opening sequence; the earliest instructions were provided by von Trier in the summer 2010, after which a team of 19 visual effects artists worked on the project for three months.

In his director's statement, von Trier wrote that he had started to regret having made such a polished film, but that he hoped it would contain some flaws which would make it interesting: "I desired to dive headlong into the abyss of German romanticism ...

The website's critical consensus states, "Melancholia's dramatic tricks are more obvious than they should be, but this is otherwise a showcase for Kirsten Dunst's acting and for Lars von Trier's profound, visceral vision of depression and destruction.

About the actors' performances, Sandhu wrote: "all of them are excellent here, but Dunst is exceptional, so utterly convincing in the lead role—troubled, serene, a fierce savant—that it feels like a career breakthrough.

Meanwhile, Gainsbourg, for whom the end of the world must seem positively pastoral after the horrors she went through in Antichrist, locates in Claire a fragility that ensures she's more than a whipping girl for social satire."

Sandhu brought up one reservation in the review, in which he gave the film the highest possible rating of five stars: "there is, as always with Von Trier's work, a degree of intellectual determinism that can be off-putting; he illustrates rather than truly explore ideas.

"[44] Peter Bradshaw, writing for The Guardian, stated "Windup merchant Lars von Trier is back with a film about the end of the world – but it's not to be taken entirely seriously", and gave it three stars out of a possible five.

[45] In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, an Atlantic culture writer found "the perspective of a catastrophe-minded person thrust into a state of actual catastrophe finds perhaps no better creative expression" than in the film.

[57] The cast featured Eryn Jean Norvill as Justine, Leeanna Walsman as Claire, Gareth Yuen as Michael, Steve Mouzakis as John, and Maude Davey as Gaby,[58] while child actors Liam Smith and Alexander Artemov shared the role of Leo.