A Cancellation Novel’s Lunar Sequel

The year 2011 saw the release of two movies — one, an auteurist masterpiece by Lars von Trier starring Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg; the other a low-budget think-piece starring co-scriptwriter Brit Marling and William Mapother, then best known as Tom Cruise’s cousin — that shared a notably similar premise. Melancholia and Another Earth each portray the Earth as menaced by the approach of a rival planet. Von Trier’s film ends with the planet striking Earth, refuting the facile reassurances of scientific rationalist Kiefer Sutherland and vindicating his sister-in-law (Dunst), who knew there was nothing to do but accept or anxiously reject your own death and the deaths of everyone you love. The underrated Another Earth, likewise death-haunted, ends more enigmatically. The new planet arrives, then hovers at a distance. Instead of obliterating ours, it reveals a duplicate world on which our lost possibilities — dead loved ones; the victims of our crimes — are wondrously preserved.