Bloodline: THE NORTHMAN

"Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning. For every one of us, living in this world means waiting for our end. Let whoever can win glory before death." - Beowulf

There’s something tough and believable and ancient in writer-director Robert Eggers’ latest film, the red-blooded, thunderously entertaining The Northman. It’s set in the harsh, brutal world of Vikings, and on the road to revenge, which is harsher and more brutal still. Sure, it has shaman and visions and a warrior who catches a spear mid-flight and tosses it back at his enemy. But its potential Conan appeals are situated in a great sense of reality. If it weren’t such a gleaming work of modern craftsmanship, and harkening back to the great epics of Hollywood’s golden age with its pomp and circumstance in massive landscapes as backdrops to human dramas, one could almost imagine the camera had been plunked down in the year 900. As such, it continues Eggers’ anthropological commitment to historical verisimilitude in vivid genre trappings. Here the thrones and the boats, the swords and the helmets, all have the look of authenticity, and real care given to photographing them in all their textures and design. And Eggers co-wrote with Icelandic author Sjón, together crafting a narrative that plays fair with the historical record even as it’s a work of impressively imagined synthesis. We notice the attention to detail, matter-of-factly presented rigor, and that’s how Eggers grounds the fantastical in a material believability of the past. The film has the weight of a real time and place, and uses it as a stage for its bloody spectacle as a warrior prince (Alexander Skarsgård) is betrayed by a villainous uncle (Claes Bang). The young man flees into exile and slavery from which he vows to avenge his father (Ethan Hawke) and free his mother (Nicole Kidman). Yes, indeed, the film asks: what if Beowulf was also Hamlet? (The prince even shares a name, Amleth, with one whose rotten Denmark  is said to have inspired the Bard.) Turns out the answer is awfully satisfying.

There’s a thrilling sturdiness to the film’s inspirations, and not simply the look and tone of the picture that unfurls historicity. Although Eggers’ films have thus far been well-researched period pieces, they just as importantly draw on a literary tradition from the times. Because they play tonally and structurally like stories from the period in which he’s setting his films, they feel all the more real. It’s not that they’re true stories of a bygone time; it’s that they feel like stories of that bygone time. His debut The Witch drew its woodsy colonial folklore fears from contemporaneous journals. He followed that with The Lighthouse, a two-man oddity which matched its turn-of-the-20th century setting by being a boxy black-and-white modernist freakout in squared-off silent-horror aesthetics. It’s only natural, then, that The Northman is built from the bones of Nordic legends and Old English epic poetry. Its dialogue—spoken in gruff barks and silky growls by a game cast—is built on the sturdy syllabic construction of Seamus Heaney’s translations. Its sense of lineage and honor is all knotty myth. Its structure, though, is pure five-act Shakespearean. It builds beautifully and ponderously, each new act slotting in the next step on the road to inevitable conflagration. It’s at once familiar and strange; like the past, they do things differently there, even if we can recognize the composite materials. It earns our investment by believing fully its own, in confident steady style that rumbles like thunder and proceeds at a deliberate pace.  

Along the way, Eggers conjures battle sequences and murky magic in striking measures. Action plays out in elegant lateral tracking shots through frenzy and violence. An enchantment in the world sneaks in through vividly imagined ambiguities—a prophesying, pale, blind Seeress (Björk); a fortune-telling skull; a woozy psychedelics-induced ritual, and a vision of Valhalla. And the throughline of revenge carries us through a long, bruising and bloody picture set against staggering natural beauty of fjords and fields, cliffs and volcano. The scenes unfold with a heaviness, a bold booming in the bass as details accumulate and our hero gets closer to his goal. The enormous vistas fill up their foregrounds with ominous plotting and intimate vengeance. The project thrillingly splits the difference between folk tale and folk horror, epic poem—brusk kennings and brute strength thematic construction—and family tragedy. It’s a film about blood and bloodlines, about passing on the honor of one’s names and gains, and maintaining in the face of so much wild danger. Not uncritical of the violent impulses, by the end, with its moonlit massacres, lava-dodging swordfights, and love with a beautiful young woman (Anya Taylor-Joy) who just might represent a better future, it clearly inhabits the intoxication and futility of revenge—the nobility and gnarliness of Viking life, and the wonder that anyone survived to tell the tale.

Monkey's Business: GODZILLA VS. KONG

So what if Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong is easily the least of these new Hollywood Godzilla flicks? Sometimes you just want what this thing delivers. It has giant monsters who fight each other three times throughout a relatively trim runtime that collapses into the credits before the two hour mark. It has a team of scientists (and a little deaf orphan) who think Kong can lead them to the Hollow Earth, and corporate stooges who think he’ll lead them to an ancient power source, too. They have to fly around in little spaceship tanks that zip along on neon blue jet trails to survive the pressure of the Earth’s Core. The vehicles make cool little bass-pumping Jetsons noises. There’s a rampaging Godzilla who doesn’t mean it—we know pretty quickly that the lizard’s being provoked by a glowing orb in the secret laboratories of a no-good tech company. A goofy podcaster teams up with a character from Godzilla: King of the Monsters to track down the truth. So we have two sets of characters, each following one half of the title bill around as they do their thing. It’s just a matter of time before the big critters come to blows by land and by sea. And, sure, Kong’s the underdog, but given how much more plot time is given over to him and his supporters, it’s pretty clear the movie’s out to make it an even match.

It’s all about the shallow spectacle. Gone is the majesty and awe of the perfectly proportioned 2014 Godzilla, with its trembling mortals staring up at the monsters spelling certain doom. Gone is the ecological pessimism of its 2019 sequel, a foolish-humanity-eclipsed-by-raw-power-of-nature parable wrapped up in terrifically overheated family drama. This thing’s just an empty go-go-go rock-‘em-sock-‘em effects picture with ramped up cartoony bouts of kaiju combat and long stretches of exposition and pokey CG light shows between. But at least it still has a host of fine character actors (this time Rebecca Hall, Alexander Skarsgård, Brian Tyree Henry and Demián Bechir join the mix) who don’t mind playing second fiddle to two famous monsters of filmland. They stare off at the digital chaos and say things like “Kong bows to no one” or “Those are Skullcrawlers” or “That podcast is filling your head with garbage!” It’s bright and colorful and dumb. And then a building will fall over or lasers will slice out of a shiny glass pyramid or a column of radioactive fire will drill a hole to the center of the earth. Then the roaring and fighting, and running and screaming. Wingard (hit and miss, but his The Guest is a rare Carpenter homage that hits and Death Note is a decent anime riff) is adept at recreating the genre pleasures we need to make it a passable lazy afternoon pleasure.

Wild Things: THE LEGEND OF TARZAN

How do you make a Tarzan movie in 2016? Over the character’s century of existence he’s been in everything from the original Edgar Rice Burroughs pulp novels, to classic studio programmers, cheap boy’s adventures, stately period piece epics, gauzy romances, and even an animated Disney musical with songs by Phil Collins. (The last one might be my personal favorite.) The story of a 19th century child, born in the jungles of Africa to shipwrecked British blue bloods, tragically orphaned, raised by apes, and who grew into a muscular wild man swinging from vines, is an old-fashioned and familiar one. What can possibly be done to make this a story worth retelling? Director David Yates’ solution is to play it straight and take it seriously, tapping into the feelings of displacement Tarzan has while torn between two worlds. The Legend of Tarzan is therefore a rip-snorting jungle adventure, a mournful story of loss, and a sober-minded reflection on the evils of colonialism. The film doesn’t always get the combination of these elements exactly right, but its heart is in the right place, and it’s an often-enjoyable entertainment.

This is a movie that begins with Tarzan (Alexander Skarsagård) already a legend, having met and married Jane (Margot Robbie) and moved to England years before the story begins. Invited back to Africa by a Belgian mercenary with ulterior motives (Christoph Waltz) and persuaded by an American adventurer who needs help proving the colonists are up to no good (Samuel L. Jackson, as a character loosely based on a real man), Tarzan decides to return to his childhood home, reuniting with the apes who raised him and the natives who taught him to become a human. He finds it’s nice to be back, but soon the bad guys attack, and the adventure through the jungle starts. The film began in the thick of colonial African politics, with the scheming Belgian cutting a deal with a vengeful chief (Djimon Hounsou) to trade Tarzan for diamonds. The reasons why are simple. The European needs money to help a bankrupt king pay for his army’s impending takeover of the Congo; the chief wants revenge for some previous scrape. The setup is clear and the villains obvious. Tarzan is in danger, and his return has endangered his loved ones.

Screenwriters Adam Cozad (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit) and Craig Brewer (Hustle & Flow) supply an interesting narrative structure, a flashback origin story nestled inside a tale of domesticated Lord Greystoke feeling the pull of the wild. This is as much The Legend as it is Tarzan, his famous exploits the source of internal and external conflict, his present as much about how he’ll reconcile his past and his present as it is the action it inspires. Potential nostalgia for the old story is cut with the horror of its peril and the sadness of what’s become of this place as colonial powers encroach. This isn’t a light adventure about a boy scampering with animals. There are hints of a more traditional Tarzan in his upsetting and romantic past, while the present is a rescue mission to stop the looting invaders from enslaving the population and strip-mining the country’s resources. It’s a high-flying, vine-swinging matinee cliffhanger – with some corny lines and broad performances – in a heavier approach. The violence carries menace and weight, and the danger in stock B-movie scenarios is played for real impact.

Against this sturdy backdrop there’s an investment in the feelings of its leads. Skarsgård carries himself with strength and confidence in his physical abilities, and a hesitance in his interactions with other Europeans. Early scenes have him stiff in suits, coming to life when showing off his unusually strong hands, or when nimbly climbing a tree in his yard. It’s with the African people and places where he stretches out, more himself even when forced into an action plot. Then a key delight is watching the burgeoning buddy relationship with Jackson’s quipping, gun-slinging American (so fun and fully formed I wished he could ride into his own exciting adventure series), which brings some of the movie’s lightest capering moments while rarely taking away from the more contemplative tone. Elsewhere the filmmakers have tried to minimize potential elements of sexism and racism from the old setup, allowing Jane (Robbie is fine, even if the character isn’t quite as fully defined as her mate’s) some agency despite quickly becoming a damsel in distress, and giving the tribesmen some portion of personality and meaningful backstory before letting them slip into the background to let Tarzan save the day.

For a long stretch of its runtime this is a more thoughtful approach to Tarzan than we usually see, the action beats landing with visceral thuds in the subwoofer while built on a convincing life-and-death sensation growing naturally out of the emotional underpinnings, which makes concessions to overfamiliar spectacle in its back half disappointing. It culminates in a big stampeding climax that’s more routine than the fascinating early going. But the way there is an effective marriage of adventure with somber impulses, a chase through the jungle with shootouts, fistfights, vine swings, and encounters with wild animals, and an earnest engagement in the reality it creates for itself. Even though this is a movie that plays into tropes – convenient animal assistance; scowling one-note villains; emotional shorthand; flat exposition – there’s a commitment to treating Tarzan’s story with a degree of seriousness, wondering what it would be like to struggle with his place in the world. It doesn’t make this a fresh story, but it makes it a solidly engaging one.

It works because Yates is a real filmmaker with a steady hand. Years helming BBC political dramas and half of the Harry Potter movies have given him the confidence to treat this material seriously without feeling the need to apologize for the potentially sillier moments. He can stage a man fighting a gorilla or a lion nuzzling an old human friend and actually make it resonate with feeling, a fearful intensity in the former and a hushed tenderness in the latter. And then he can turn around and have sincere historical understanding of Belgian slavers in the Congo without feeling exploitative or cheapened. Yates grounds the proceedings in specificity, the handsomely mounted production designed by Stuart Craig (another Potter vet) and photographed by Henry Braham gleaming in cobblestone London, palatial manors, and lovely natural vistas of savanna, river, and jungle. As the movie is interested in examining its wilderness locations from the eyes of a man who was raised there, then left, and is now back again – and through its bifurcated structure that makes it an introduction and its own sequel – there’s an interesting tension powering the action.

Future Past: THE GIVER

The recent spate of films adapted from young adult dystopian fiction created the economic conditions necessary for a movie based on Lois Lowry’s beloved 1993 book The Giver. That book, with its special teen receiving wisdom about the oppression underpinning the pristine homogonous future world in which he lives, laid the groundwork for future YA tentpoles like The Hunger Games and Divergent. But as is often the case, tracing the fad back to the source reveals a starker, stranger, and more ambivalent and ambiguous work than its imitators. And so, superficial similarities to those recent YA films aside, this film has more in common with small scale 70’s sci-fi or an extended Twilight Zone episode with its earnestly metaphorical nature and careful tone.

In this future, the entire known world is only a town full of modular buildings and imagineered flora. The people, dressed in the same drab pajama-like clothes, never leave because they have no reason to. They have no concept of geography or history or memory. They don’t perceive emotion and can’t see color. Their daily injections keep them anesthetized and compliant. Ignorance really is bliss. Even the leader (a frosty Meryl Streep) blindly follows their institutional memories of How Things Are Done. The rules allow one person access to memories of life before, understandings of human nature – love, hate, peace, war – and creation – art, music, philosophy – for which the general public simply has no need. Living alone on the edge of town in a small book-lined house, he (Jeff Bridges, looking like he’s carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders) is only called upon when the leader needs advice.

It’s a clearly metaphorical place, a cautionary tale about smoothing over humanity’s rough patches in the pursuit of a blind form of conflict-free sameness. It’s not Orwellian as much as it is right out of Huxley, who feared in his novel Brave New World that the future would find knowledge devalued and the populace passive through nothing more than a regular dose of happy ignorance. No one would question the system because no one would think to. You don’t need thought police once the people have forgotten how to have thoughts. Putting The Giver’s world on screen, director Phillip Noyce, finding a balance between his character-driven dramas like The Quiet American and rip-roaring actioners like Salt, shoots in black and white, representing the cognitive state of the people. It’s a grey world, seductively crisp and eerily blank.

When 18-year-old Jonas (Brenton Thwaites) is handpicked to be the new Receiver of Memory, he begins to get access to the history of human thought and experience. It’s dangerous. The former Receiver (Taylor Swift) mysteriously disappeared rather than keep receiving enlightenment. Bridges warns the boy about the dangers, and then grabs his forearms and beams psychic transmissions into his protégé’s brain. Rushes of knowledge are represented by colorful blasts of high-def nature photography, pixilated home video snippets, and grainy archival footage. As his understanding grows, Jonas sees color slowly seep into the frame. He stares at his best friend (Odeya Rush). Her hair is a soft red in an otherwise black and white frame (a la Pleasantville). Soon pale green grass and soft blue sky appear in the film’s imagery. Then, eventually, the film is in full color. It’s a nice visual representation of one of the book’s most interior concepts.

Jonas goes off his meds and discovers stirrings of romantic interest that set him apart even further. His parents (Katie Holmes and Alexander Skarsgård) look at him confused and worried. He’s moved beyond their unknowingly small perceptions of life. It’s a clever metaphor not only for oppression, but for growing up, moving out, and becoming your own person distinct and yet still a part of your family unit. Eventually, Jonas must decide what to do with all this newfound knowledge, and that’s where the movie begins to dumb itself down to get into the category the marketplace needs it to fit.

Screenwriters Michael Mitnick and Robert B. Weide ramp up some of the movie’s more contemporary YA adjacent ideas, creating a pro forma romantic triangle that’s admirably restrained given the characters’ flat affects, but distracting nonetheless. Then the climax gussies the small, allegorical plot up with a few chase scenes and a nonsense race-against-the-clock climactic save-the-future goal that runs counter to the material’s tantalizingly philosophical ambiguities. I could feel the movie straining against its commercial impulses as it tries to find a happy ending in what is a muted and ambiguous vision. It ends up feeling cheaper and more familiar than the intriguing opening suggests. But it retains enough of a glimmer of its source material’s introspective personality and distinctive mood to wish it was willing to be less derivative, instead of chasing the past success of the book’s successors. 

Sunk: BATTLESHIP

I don’t know if the nonstop digital chaos and noise wore me down or what, but parts of Battleship aren’t that bad. The main plot point of this movie-based-on-a-board-game is that during joint military exercises between the United States and Japan off the coast of Hawaii, an alien ship of some kind comes in for a splash landing and opens fire. So the movie’s basically American and Japanese sailors protecting Pearl Harbor from alien invasion. Why, that’s almost enough to bring a tear to the eye. Well, in a better movie it would be, one interested in exploring context and building characters or metaphors or providing any sort of narrative momentum or rooting interest other than “Blow up them aliens real good!” It’s a thin blockbuster that takes forever getting started and then has little but unoriginal drivel to get to once it does.

The payoff of all this is actually somewhat competent as far as these kind of big, impersonal blow-‘em-up blockbusters go. It’s the setup that’s totally bonkers and tonally messy, which dilutes the climactic excitement, reducing it to merely better than what’s come before. Screenwriters Erich and Jon Hoeber start us off with some pretty weird scenes that collide into each other in awkward ways. First, we meet twenty-something screw-up Alex (Taylor Kitsch) sitting in a bar, getting a lecture from his Naval-officer brother (Alexander Skarsgård). It’s a grow-up and get-responsible kind of lecture that awkwardly segues into a happy-birthday cupcake. Then a blonde bombshell (Brooklyn Decker) walks in and Alex goes over to hit on her. She wants a burrito but the bartender won’t give her one this late at night. Alex tries to get one for her and ends up breaking into a closed convenience store to do so, getting tased for his troubles.

Cut to some unspecified time later. Alex is now in the Navy, too. He’s talking about marrying blondie, but she wants him to ask her dad, Admiral Liam Neeson, for her hand first. Also there’s a pre-war games soccer game between America and Japan’s sailors that he loses and a subsequent fight that he gets into. He’s in real danger of getting bounced out of the military after these military exercises are over with, but is also third in command or something. I don’t get it either. This whole jumble of exposition and character building is so confused and tone-deaf, as if the writers had a vague sense of how movies worked and figured they better set up the whos, whats, wheres, whens, and whys before getting into the action, but had little idea of how to actually go about doing that.

But then, the aliens arrive. These unseen baddies set up a force field around the islands, cutting off a few battleships from all outside help. Poor Liam Neeson can only appear in one or two scenes where he looks determined, worried, and utterly powerless to intervene. Meanwhile, blondie is stuck on the side of a Hawaiian mountain where she is occasionally called upon to interact with a veteran (real veteran Gregory D. Gadson) who has two prosthetic legs and together the two of them look over at some aliens off in the distance and look worried. It’s up to good old Alex to rise to the occasion and figure out how to stop the alien invasion. And I haven’t even mentioned the quivering scientist (Hamish Linklater), also stranded on that mountain, whose satellite array brought the aliens to Hawaii in the first place. There’s also the scowling Petty Officer played by pop star Rihanna and the comic relief (I guess?) provided by Jesse Plemons. They get to scowl and crack wise and shoot big guns.

But anyways, all these characters are trapped in this impenetrable energy bubble. I was all ready to hate the movie based on how terminally uninvolving and unbelievably sloppy I found the schlocky first hour (or more) of this 131-minute movie. Even the opening alien salvo is just nonsense, shredding city streets and toppling buildings in a familiar and dull way. A main character dies almost immediately when a battleship goes down and I hardly cared. But then a funny thing happened. The movie picks up some steam and charges forward into occasionally diverting silliness. It doesn’t get good, exactly, but it moves up from awful to just plain watchable mediocrity. By the end I wasn’t enjoying myself, exactly, but the highly improbable use of a floating museum in the climax made me smile a little.

And it’s kind of clever how the gameplay of Battleship is integrated into the movie. The battleships can’t detect the alien vessels on their radar, but luckily the alien ships can’t seem to spot them either. Luckily a Japanese officer (Tadanobu Asano) comes aboard to help the Americans detect the vessels. He does something related to water displacement and buoy sensors, but the end result is a grid that looks suspiciously like the board game. “E-11!” “Fire!” “Anything?” “It’s a miss!” The following sequence is rather suspenseful, if more than a little goofy. But it’s not any sillier than the way the alien’s missiles are cylinders with little pegs in the bottom so that they stick in the battleships before blowing up. Again, like the game. This is what’s modestly involving about the movie. I never cared about the characters. The humans are mostly indistinguishable except for the main characters that we’re told to like and root for just because they are the main characters. The aliens are just a squishy, flavorless, derivative horde. What do they even want? Who knows? Open fire!

The problem that plagues the movie all the way through is the lack of personality. That’s why the flashes of board-game-referencing winks are the most enjoyable moments; they’re the only relatable, recognizable moments. The acting’s simply functional for such dysfunctional roles. Neeson’s wasted. Kitsch is a blank. (John Carter had a much better role for him.) Rihanna could actually be a good (or even great) action star in a better movie; she has plenty of tough charm here. Linklater’s scientist gets one sort of good line when he comes crashing out of the jungle: “They killed my grad students!” Decker was hired for her cleavage. Not helping the actors much at all are the action and effects which, from the aliens’ designs right down to the nonstop weightless carnage, are just so much shiny digital confusion.

Director Peter Berg, not the most consistent of filmmakers (on the one hand, Friday Night Lights, on the other, Hancock), has shot it all in a style that can only be called watered-down Michael Bay. It’s all of the militarism and convoluted plotting with none of the idiosyncratic personality and ability to create striking imagery. Love him or hate him, it’s hard to deny that Bay has a distinctive style and when he’s given a big, loud set-piece to execute he knows, for better or worse, how to play it up big.  Here Berg’s only cobbling together a pale imitation, serving up so little payoff that there’s little sense waiting through the setup. 

End of Her World: MELANCHOLIA

Danish provocateur Lars von Trier’s Melancholia opens with striking slow motion shots of a metaphorical nature. A bride (Kirsten Dunst) tries to move through an ominous forest with dark, heavy strings tangled around her arms and legs. A woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) tries to run across a golf course carrying her young son, but finds her feet sinking into the ground. Then the world ends. This is a movie about depression, about the soul-deadening dive into unceasing and motionless sadness. These opening shots, strikingly unnerving, are such a perfect evocation that the following film is merely a two-hour plus continuation of the themes that have been so simply expressed. This film is tiresome and oppressive and that’s exactly the point. It’s every bit as emotionally draining as I’m sure Von Trier would want me to find it. It’s a good approximation, an evocation, of depression.

The first part of the film follows a wedding reception that slowly drains of revelry as the distracted bride’s depression grows clearer and stronger. She slips away from the party to wander through the mansion of her sister (Gainsbourg). She tries to nap. She takes a bath. Meanwhile the guests are getting anxious. Her new husband (Alexander Skarsgård) grows increasingly confused. Her mother (Charlotte Rampling), who didn’t want to be there in the first place, wanders away as well. Her father (John Hurt) seems mostly oblivious. Her sister’s filthy rich husband (Kiefer Sutherland) is stewing, thinking this party is fast becoming a waste of money. The wedding planner (Udo Kier, in a very funny performance) is so upset in a dry, passive-aggressive way that he declares he will no longer look at the bride, covering his face with one hand to block her from his vision.

This poor woman is so clearly troubled, slowly sinking into her depression as if it were quicksand. She gets testy. Her boss (Stellan Skarsgård) finds reason to doubt her fresh promotion. A few different people forcefully tell her to “be happy.” As if that will help. This marriage is over before it’s even begun. There’s a destabilizing depression settling into its foundation.

The second part of the film follows this woman as her condition has worsened. She’s back at the mansion of her sister and her sister’s husband and son. She sleeps constantly. Sometimes she can’t even bring herself to move, not even to take care of herself. Her sister half-carries her to the bathroom, runs a bath, undresses her, but can’t get her to lift her leg to get in the tub. Her sister cooks her favorite meal, but one bite of meatloaf has her weeping, saying it tastes like ashes. This is truly becoming a debilitating depression. It threatens to pull in all of the characters around her.

Of course, it doesn’t help matters that a newly discovered planet many times larger than our own has a wide arc of an orbit that will swing it past the Earth with some chance of a devastating collision that would engulf the entire planet. This planet is named Melancholia, clearly marking it as a symbol of the film’s central concern. Depression is a terrible and terrifying condition that seeps bone deep into Dunst’s character then slowly infects Gainsbourg and the others. The panic over the looming potential of a forthcoming apocalypse adds to the sense of inescapable devastation and understandable pessimism. Melancholia, like her depression, may very well destroy their lives.

These are fantastic performances, filled with a kind of immediacy and depth that belies Von Trier’s more schematic aims. He’s content to lay out the themes of the film in broad, though artful, strokes, but through the skillful actresses’ best efforts, this depression moves beyond a collection of signifiers both vague and specific, both literal and metaphorical. Dunst utter helplessness in the face of it, the aching battle within her that is masked at times by her stoic unhappiness, is painfully honest. Gainsbourg joins her in a duet of emotion with a performance that, once it descends into pure anxiety, is infectious. These sisters live contagious emotional lives that bring an edge of danger to their respective, intertwined, psychological issues.

I had an intense physical response to the aesthetics of the film. The swirling shaky handheld camera, especially during the wedding reception, made me nauseous. I’ve never before had that response to a shaking, swooping camera. Something about the intensity with which the film explored such a strong, corrosive state of mind melded with Manuel Alberto Claro’s cinematography to make me sick to my stomach. Later, as Melancholia grows closer, I found anxiety for my nerves to match my stomach. By the time the film arrives at its gut-rattling cataclysmic climax, it was as if a weight was lowering onto my shoulders. In short, this film left me a bit of a wreck and in desperate need of a recovery period. This is such a powerful and upsetting film, as well as often tedious and seemingly repetitive, maddening and overwhelming in equal measure. It’s a great evocation of a seemingly insurmountable problem. In the end, it’s a film about how depression is great practice for dealing with the end of the world.