A Bleak Kirsten Dunst Sci-Fi Movie Is Finally Finding An Audience On Hulu

On Rotten Tomatoes, the critical consensus for “Melancholia” reads: “‘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.” If this seems like a good sign for the film’s overall rating, you’d be right; it earned a solid 80% on the review aggregator, and it also received a number of accolades. After the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Dunst won the festival’s award for Best Actress, both the New York Film Critics Online and the National Society of Film Critics named it the one of the top films of 2011, and much later on in 2019, publications like Vulture ranked it among the very best films of the decade.

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Anyway, what about individual critics? For IndieWire, Lisa Rosman wrote, “In ‘Melancholia,’ [Lars] von Trier has created a mission statement of a masterpiece, one that reminds us that nihilism itself can serve as a legitimate form of creation, a means as well as The End.” Bob Mondello seemed to agree; as he put it in his review for NPR, “It’s a planet that can’t come soon enough for her, but one that I kept willing away. Not, I’m a little embarrassed to say, to save humanity from ‘Melancholia,’ but simply to stay in this remarkable movie’s presence just a little longer.” Over at Slate, Dana Stevens seemed slightly more mixed but still arrived at a positive conclusion — “There’s something about the solemn, gloomy, often overwhelmingly powerful experience of watching ‘Melancholia.’ I’ll give it this much: This is a hard movie to forget” — and Andrew O’Hehir called it “the most composed and beautiful and conspicuously adult film of [von Trier’s] career” in his review for Salon. Entertainment Weekly’s critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, meanwhile, had some of the most effusive praise for the film, writing, “Although ‘Melancholia,’ by its very title, declares a mournful state of mind, the movie is, in fact, the work of a man whose slow emergence from personal crisis has resulted in a moving masterpiece, marked by an astonishing profundity of vision.”

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Not every critic was fully on board with “Melancholia,” though. As Mike D’Angelo wrote for The AV Club, “There’s a disconnect here between concept and execution — a sort of desultory, moment-to-moment clumsiness — that makes ‘Melancholia’ feel like therapy poorly disguised as drama.” Over at Slant Magazine, Ed Gonzalez agreed: “‘Melancholia’ is a film of few epiphanies and even fewer insights, and as artful as the film’s doom and gloom may be, its symbolism flounders.” Certainly, the film isn’t for everyone — but still, reviews were overwhelmingly positive. So, what has Dunst been doing since her lauded performance in “Melancholia?”