ABSTRACT
There are instances in which the very title of a film immediately draws the spectator's attention to a significant and obvious subtext. Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus is a case in point. In the event that the spectator needs some prompting, the main characters are called Orpheus and Eurydice, and the plot generally follows the Greek myth's tragic drama of love and loss. The comparison of hypertext and its obvious subtext is thus encouraged from the start. Lars von Trier's vision of the exoplanet Melancholia approaching the Earth is truly mesmerizing, however vague and elemental a message its cryptic symbolic subtext supports. The contextualization of the criticism of terrorist ideology in terms of a charming childish conversation blunts to some degree the critical edge of what could have been an instance of biting satire. However, what arguably constitutes a cryptic subtext is its possible interpretation as an allusion to modern Islamist terrorism.
