The movie follows two sisters, Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), as the planet Melancholia hurtles towards Earth. The movie is divided into two parts.The first part follows Justine's doomed wedding day. While the second part focuses on the sisters' different responses to the situation: Justine finds peace in the thought of imminent destruction while Claire falls into a spiral of anxiety.
A major focus of contemporary science deals with the understanding of critical transitions – situations, like the close encounter of Earth and Melancholia, where forecasting the final outcome is extremely challenging. The presentation will focus on the challenges of prediction in the vicinity of critical transitions, and how this is reflected in the film's climactic structure, which was a direct inspiration for the scientific paper: V. Lucarini and T. Bodai, Edge states in the climate system: exploring global instabilities and critical transitions, Nonlinearity 30 R32 (2017).
