Melancholia Explained

Melancholia has two layers. One is more obvious and familiar and shouldn’t surprise you in any way. The other is a bit more abstract and you’ll have to bear with me. The good news is, you’ll come away from this article with a far better understanding of Melancholia. That I promise you.

Let’s dig in.

The Obvious Symbolism

So, the obvious interpretation of Melancholia is that the rogue planet is a metaphor for Justine’s mental health issues. Think of the Earth as the life she’s trying to live. And the rogue planet as a depressive episode that blows up her life. That’s exactly what you see in Part One, right? Initially, Justine and Michael seem happy, in love, excited to start this new chapter as a married couple. But throughout the reception, Justine’s mood changes. She grows more distant and distraught. Eventually, she blows it all up. Her marriage, her career, her future. Part One is a grounded, realistic demonstration of the way a depressive episode can impact someone’s life.

Part One treats the viewer as an observer. We witness what it’s like to see someone go through an episode like this. Part Two tries to make the viewer feel what it’s like to go through an episode. The sense of anticipation and dread. The denial. The false hope. The acceptance. Part Two is an existential, dramatized version of events. It’s one thing to hear Justine describe what an episode is like. It’s another to show it, to quite literally have “Melancholia” crash into the Earth and destroy the world.

The science fiction elements that suddenly make the movie surreal actually allow the viewer to feel something closer to the truth of the experience. You go from clinical to poetic. From outside to inside. Throughout Part Two, you should be asking yourself, “How would I feel in this situation?”

The supporting characters mirror this experience. In Part One, they watch Justine go through what she’s going through. But in Part Two, they have to go through it as well. Claire’s no longer the superior sister who pities her poor, unwell sibling who struggles to live a normal life. Melancholy is something that can hit any one of us. And it sucks. Until you’ve experienced it, it’s hard to understand just how overwhelming the emotions are.

My impression is that von Trier’s asking the audience to reflect on their own emotions and have more awareness of and empathy for the emotions of others and what they might be going through. Claire’s husband, John, is the antithesis of that. He’s patient with Justine for the sake of Claire, but, really, he’s kind of a narrow-minded jerk who eventually abandons his family. He acts high and mighty when his mental health is fine, but crumbles as soon as he encounters the melancholy that had affected Justine.

That, to me, speaks directly to the idea that people who haven’t had a depressive episode shouldn’t judge or look down on those who have. It can render you helpless. Which von Trier captures in that final moment when Justine, Claire, and Leo can do nothing else but sit together as the planet explodes.

In Part One, the performative nature of everything is part of what triggers Justine’s episode. She can’t easily accept the rituals and routines of society and calls out their artificiality. Claire finds comfort in those things. Losing them, her husband, her child, the life she enjoyed, sends her reeling much in the way Justine had. We see her breaking down as Melancholia arrives.

Justine, in those final moments, is calm and ready, because the performance is finally over. All the artifice is gone.

I will say, though, that as bleak as Justine’s world view is, I do think there’s something bittersweet at the end. Justine and Claire had been divided by their differing worldviews. Justine couldn’t respect Claire’s playing into the performance of society, while Claire could be condescending of her sister’s inability to do the same. At the end, Claire’s no longer performing and Justine’s no longer rebelling. The audience is gone. The stage is gone. The show is over. That allows Justine to finally find calm, and it allows Claire to let her emotions out. Justine, for maybe the first time ever, gets to be the caring sister, the supportive sister.

In a world stripped of its artifice, Justine finally finds something real. Be with the people you love, until you can’t.

Lars von Trier’s Own Words

In an interview with Nils Thorson, von Trier was pretty open about the creation of Melancholia. Here are some select quotes.

[Justine’s] not serious about the wedding. In the start, she is toying with it all in an off-hand manner, because she feels so on top of things that she can poke fun at it. But slowly, melancholia descends like a curtain between her and all the things she has set in motion.
If you ask me, she is longing for shipwrecks and sudden death, as Tom Kristensen wrote. And she gets it, too. In a way, she succeeds in pulling this planet from behind the sun and she surrenders to it.
A wedding, after all, is a ritual. But is there something beyond the ritual at all? There isn’t. Not to her. It’s a great shame that we melancholiacs don’t value rituals. I’m having a tough time at parties myself. Now we’ll all have fun, fun, fun. Perhaps because melancholiacs set the stakes higher than at just a few beers and some music. And there’s more of a party if we have colored festoons. It seems so phony. Rituals are, you know. But if rituals are worth nothing, that goes for everything…. If there’s some value beyond the rituals, that’s fine. The ritual is like a film. There has to be something in the film. And then the film’s plot is the ritual that leads us to what’s inside. And if there’s something inside and beyond, I can relate to the ritual. But if the rituals are empty, that is: if it’s no longer fun to get Christmas present or see the joy of the kids, then the whole ritual about dragging a tree inside the living room becomes empty.
Is the emperor wearing any clothes at all?…. And that’s what Justine sees every time she looks at that fucking wedding. [Michael] isn’t wearing anything. She has submitted to a ritual without a meaning.
[Justine] is longing for something of true value. And true values entail suffering. That’s the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don’t think that’s complete real, do we?
The wedding is Justine’s last attempt to fight her way back into life itself instead of longing herself out of it. That’s why she wants to get married. She thinks: now I’m forcing my way through the rituals and some truth my issue from it. When you’re being cured of a depression, you’re forced to instigate some rituals as well. Take a five minute walk, for instance. And by going through the motions, the rituals will accumulate some meaning as well…. However, her longings are too great. Her hankering for truth is too colossal.
…in the end…I think [the sisters] get together there. That is also what hints at a happy end. That the two opposites melt together. They have different reaction patterns, of course. But they have been two, and they become one.

The Less Obvious Meaning Of Melancholia

Underneath the more obvious discussion about mental health, von Trier uses Melancholia to talk about the artistic process. That’s why the very beginning of the movie is so painterly. Let’s go shot by shot through the opening scene and see how von Trier builds the film’s foundation.

We start with a portrait of Justine, looking miserable, as birds fall out of the sky behind her.
Cut to a giant sundial in the yard, with the neat, manicured trees serving as a frame.
Cut to an actual painting (The Return of the Hunters by Pieter Bruegel)—hunters on a hilltop return to town with a pack of canines. As we stare at it, the painting burns.
Jump to outer space and the visual of Earth in the midground, and a distant pinpoint of reddish light in the background. Slowly, that glowing celestial body, the lone light source, moves behind the Earth, and everything goes dark.
An image of Claire running with Leo across the golf course. She moves in slow-motion, and everything around her is still. Once again, it feels like a painting.
A horse collapses in the night. Again, in slow-motion.
Justine standing in the dark, with thousands of butterflies around her.
Justine, Leo, and Claire out in the landscape where the sundial is. The immense estate behind them. The clouded sky with multiple moons appears apocalyptic and fantastic.
Back to outer space: the Earth and the moon, half in light, half in dark.
Justine holds up her hands and electricity writhes out from her fingertips.
Justine in her wedding dress trudges through the woods, with vines around her ankles and waist, restraining her progress.
A dark planet approaches the bright Earth. It’s almost romantic, if the implication wasn’t so awful.
A quiet room in the estate. Out the window, you see a tree on fire.
Justine’s in her wedding dress, floating in a river, surrounded by lily pads and vegetation, holding a bouquet over her chest.
Leo, in the foreground, carves a stick, while Justine approaches from out of the woods in the midground.
A gigantic rogue planet obliterates the Earth.
Title screen: Lars Von Trier Melancholia

While those shots might seem random, they’re carefully selected to convey the film’s major thematic concerns.

The closeup of Justine tells us this is about a human experience. The birds falling out of the sky convey a sense of downward movement. Given the title of the film, the birds are a pretty obvious metaphor. They’re supposed to soar. Instead, they’re crashing. What do we see with Justine in Part One? Instead of her life taking off into this new chapter: she crashes.
The sundial is a physical representation of time. This abstract thing has been given a physical form that transcends function and becomes about aesthetics. Which is what von Trier does with the idea of melancholy in this film. He takes an abstract concept and gives it a form concerned with aesthetics. Time, as a concept, is often associated with death. So you can view the sundial as a reminder of morality.
While the first two shots had the look and feel of paintings, the third shot really is a painting.
1. The simple explanation here is that this shot just generally establishes the idea that there’s some connection between Justine, time, and art.
2. If you want to read further into it, my interpretation is as follows…We tend to think of art as immutable. There’s this idea that while the artist is mortal, the art is immortal and will persist long after its creator. Its one way that humans cope with death. We love this idea that we’ve left something that people might remember us for. Part of the reason human civilization has thrived to the point it has is because we’ve built on what others have left behind. Art, science, math, philosophy, etc. It’s meaningful, then, when this painting burns. If art is meant to carry the spirit of humanity forward, onward, the destruction of art becomes the obliteration of our existence. The painting burning is another version of the world exploding.
The vast zoom out to the Earth itself makes this a global concern. Justine’s our vessel for the discussion, the main character, but this is larger than her. This is a movie about depression and here we have the light disappearing and shadow covering the planet. That’s the vibe von Trier wants. A planet plunged into darkness. Darkness enveloping life.

5-15 all repeat topics introduced in 1-4. Human action and emotion take on the look and feel of art. Claire’s attempt to run away with Leo, to save him from something that’s impossible to run from. The horse’s demise. Justine floating in her wedding dress is a reaction of the famous depiction of Ophelia by John Everett Millais.

Von Trier never shows us another literal painting like Return of the Hunters because the shots themselves have become the paintings.

This early introduction of the relationship between human emotion and art positions Melancholia as a meta commentary on the artistic process. It’s not just a movie about depression. It’s also about expression.

For example, I’d argue you can view Justine’s wedding to Michael as not just a wedding to Michael but the early stages of an art project. You’re excited about it. Committed to it. You think it’s going to be this wonderful, life changing thing. And then it takes a turn. The process becomes complicated, ugly. What you thought you were going to make doesn’t come to fruition. The work stalls. You quit altogether.

Through this lens, I think Part Two is actually kind of triumphant. Melancholia’s collision with the Earth is a kind of breakthrough, like when a long-gestating idea finally arrives.

This is anecdotal, but it’s not uncommon to start a work from a theoretical place via a superficial concept. Like, “Oh, it would be cool to write this story about a treasure hunter!” You start. Things are going well, but you have to start answering questions. What’s the main character’s motivation? Why are they a treasure hunter? What does finding this treasure mean to them? What are they afraid of? What do they hope for?

To answer for the character, you have to answer for yourself. And that can churn up very real, very complicated emotions. In order to do your best work as an artist, to really do the work, you have to have these self-examination and confront emotions you may have otherwise avoided.

Think about the movie Up. It could have started with the idea that this grumpy old man flies off in a balloon house and learns to have fun again. But you have to eventually establish why he’s a grumpy old man. You start writing about his backstory and him meeting the love of his life and the years they had together and it’s beautiful and lovely. Then you realize his wife has to die. That’s what made him grumpy. Death. Loss. Grief. To honestly depict that, you have to feel those things. Work through your own relationship with death, loss, and grief. Your own bitterness about the past. Your own anger at what you’ll never get back. You come to realize that you’ve also, without even realizing it, become more cynical than you were 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20. That you, just like the character, need to do some work on your relationship with joy.

Honestly, as I was writing all of that, I started to feel it. Like, I legitimately have tears in my eyes right now because I’m not writing about Up anymore, I’m writing about myself. I did not intend for that to happen. I intended to provide a thoughtful, academic example of how the process of creating something can turn introspective, heavy, and challenging. In doing so, I found myself becoming introspective, heavy, and challenged.

Ultimately, the process is cathartic. Whenever I write an explanation like this, I feel it. When I wrote my first novel, I felt it. When I wrote my second novel, I felt it. When I finish a poem, I feel it. Etc. etc.

When you create something, you inhabit a world. And when you finish that creation, you leave that world. It’s a complicated moment. Because the ending is the culmination of everything. You’re swept up and swept away. You feel a wonder and a rush that’s incredibly unique each and every time. There’s an immensity to concluding. It’s the end. All your time and all your effort. It finally amounted to this tangible thing. You’ve turned time into a sundial. Depression into a killer rogue planet. The glob of feelings you had at watching a movie into a 3,000 word article. It feels like you can shoot electricity from your fingertips.

As amazing as that is, it’s also not. For many reasons. The work is done and you’re back to the normal world as you know it. You’re back to real world responsibilities and commitments. No longer being so deeply connected to the concept or the characters or the emotions can be lonely. And what will come of it all? Will anyone read what you wrote? See what you painted? Hear the music you created?

Once you make the art, can you, will you, should you, turn it into a product? If you don’t, then what was the point? But it’s also infuriating. Distribution is dependent on gatekeepers. A movie needs a distributor. A novel needs a publisher. An album needs a record label. A painting needs a gallery. You can try to self-distribute, but that’s like a tree falling in the woods and no one being around to hear it.

You pour your soul into something, have this tremendous experience, and the end result is often a void. You might as well have done nothing. It’s depressing. Even for someone as acclaimed as von Trier. He still had to, has to, jump through hoops to get funding, distribution, etc.

Maybe I’m reaching too much with this one. There’s no interview quote to back it up. But I feel like it’s one of those situations where I just know. Game recognizes game, as they say.

Additional context about the relationship between melancholy and art:

Over 2000 years ago, in the BC years, during the early days of organized medicine, there existed the idea of “humors”. The famous Hippocrates, the father of medicine as we know it, wrote in On the Nature of Man:

The Human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not mixed with others. The body depends heavily on the four humors because their balanced combination helps to keep people in good health.

The Ancient Greek for “black bile” was melas kholé. So if someone had too much “black bile” they were “melancholic”. He associated melancholy with sadness, fear, depression, suffering. etc. Over the centuries, as medical science refined, humors lost their practical merit but gained in poetic appeal. It’s similar to how the practice of alchemy was really popular for about 600 years, was proven to be completely absurd, but remains, as of 2025, an alluring mainstay of fantasy stories and conspiracy theories.

Around the 1600s, melancholy became an aesthetic, a key theme in poetry, fiction, theater, etc. Shakespeare’s Hamlet? Melancholy. Dracula? Melancholy. Gothic art? Melancholy. Romanticism? Melancholy. One of the most famous poets of all time, John Keats, wrote a poem called “Ode to Melancholy.” One of the most famous philosophers of all time, Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote a poem called “To Melancholy”.

As of the 21st century, no one uses the word “melancholy” in casual conversation. “How was my weekend? Man, so melancholic.” It’s archaic, like someone saying “betwixt” or “yonder” or “forsooth”.

But just because words like that don’t work in day-to-day dialogue doesn’t mean they’re dead. Nocturne is a word, like melancholy, that is alive and well in the arts. Here are some artists who have used “nocturne” in a song title:

Billy Joel
Daft Punk
Secret Garden
Joshua Bell
Eden
Laufey
Alicia Keys
Rush

Lars von Trier would absolutely be aware of context and subtext around a word like melancholy. Given the other references to art and artistry that appear throughout Melancholia, I just can’t help but think the relationship between the depressive mode and the artistic process was something he had in mind while making the film. And it’s something you see him continue to explore in films like The House that Jack Built.

Cast

Justine – Kirsten Dunst
Claire – Charlotte Gainsbourg
John – Kiefer Sutherland
Leo – Cameron Spurr
Michael – Alexander Skarsgård
Jack – Stellan Skarsgård
Tim – Brady Corbet
Dexter – John Hurt
Gaby – Charlotte Rampling
Written by – Lars von Trier
Directed by – Lars von Trier

Melancholia Explained | Justine Is Depressed