You want Christmas escapism? You've come to the right place. Nothing will make you forget the season of goodwill faster than a couple of hours spent disturbed, aggravated, exhausted and gripped by this, the latest from director Lars Von Trier whose clumsy press conference joke about being a Nazi got him drummed out of Cannes earlier this year.
The top prize at that festival was won by Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, the year's other confounding cinematic leap into the cosmic. It's been said that because they are both about life, the universe and everything, that The Tree of Life and Melancholia make a good pair. Except, well, Tree was an abstract bore.
Melancholia is lots of things - apocalyptic sci-fi, unhinged family saga, and an affecting evocation of the crippling effects of depression. And it does all that while offering some mind-bending combos of visuals and music, including the best use of Wagner in a soundtrack since Apocalypse Now.
So it's never boring. Maddening yes. But for Von Trier, whose past films - especially his previous, the self-mutilating gothic horror of Antichrist - have been defined by his wilful perversity, Melancholia is relatively restrained.
That said, it is a movie about a woman who thinks every day is the end of the world. And then, care of a colliding planet named Melancholia, one day, it is ...
