Netflix Watch Instantly Pick of the Week - 4/16/12

Melancholia

From 2011, Lars Von Trier's Melancholia his the controversial Danish director's most accessible and adult-minded film, as he skipped the usual "shock" cinema he seems to enjoy pushing so much and instead concentrated on his themes and characters instead, ultimately serving the story as opposed to his own desires. In Melancholia, Kirsten Dunst, who won the Best Actress award at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for her role in this movie, plays a depressed woman who can't break out of her funk even on her wedding day, and the first half of the movie plays almost like a comedy of ill-manners as her family deals with her depression during the wedding reception. And the second half of the movie focuses on her severe depression leaving her immobile and despondent, while her sister, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, tries her best to help. And the entire time, there is a distant planet called Melancholia, recently discovered and believed to be making a pass very close to the Earth, which thrills many people, but leaves others in fear, as they suspect this planet Melancholia will actually slam headlong into Earth, killing them all. An interesting, intense, and surprisingly poetic and beautiful film about depression, Melancholia is a great movie that isn't full-on science fiction but instead uses it's great science fiction premise to meditate on a very emotional and reality-based subject matter, and it's done extremely well (click here for my original review).

Watch it Instantly right here on Netflix!