At least no one gets their testicles smashed by a piece of wood.

“Melancholia”

If nothing can be said for Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia,” you can say this: it is opulently grotesque, but it has none of the fraudulently classist cross-eyed pandering of his last film, “Antichrist.” It may be rococo apocalypto, but “Melancholia” is also an insatiably restless work, marked by a clarity of purpose that’s bracing … if also very, very bleak.

Things begin slowly — glacially, almost — as a Wagner cues keeps up beneath images of doom and distress: a woman (Kirsten Dunst) slogs through a golf course and then a forest; another (Charlotte Gainsbourg) clutches a child beneath a large black sky. In outer space (yes yes, outer space), two planets — one ours, one not — circle and then collide.

Blackness.

“Melancholia” picks up from there, tracing, in two parts, how one family first learns and later copes with the coming of the end of the world.

There is a wedding, for the first half, and then a moping, for the second, and von Trier follows the course of his characters through the various malaises. Dunst’s Justine, as it turns out, is to be wed to Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) in the home of her sister, Gainbourg’s Claire, and Claire’s husband John (Kiefer Sutherland). But there are problems — including the sisters’ parents, who are either bitter or addled or both, and Justine’s own rising reluctance to do anything more than wallow — and problems atop those problems, including that big cosmic one alluded to at the beginning.

After the wedding comes the fall, in a shorter second half that traps the sisters in their family estate as the end approaches. But von Trier masks in his stony, overwrought style an emotional ferocity that is anything but: he prickles and pins his characters up against their flaws and struggles with a tenacity that belies the technique’s sadism. And out of that pain he pulls delicate, detailed performances from his actors’ pain. Dunst, in particular, is prismatic in her swanning distress: her mounting insanity comes to seem positively oracular.

And still there are such images, of falling birds and crashing planets and fiber-fine tendrils of electricity. von Trier works his light-warping desaturation techniques and elliptical camerawork on a grander scale than he has in the past, but he doesn’t falter in the leap. Indeed, in stretching his devoutly malevolent, even anti-bourgeois, canvas across the stars, von Trier makes a convincing, heart-sickening case for the end of the world — proving that just because he is a doomsday prophet doesn’t also mean he is not a poet.

Catch “Melancholia” at Ciné through Dec. 15.