The film’s startling opening sequence of stunning slow-motion tableaux utilizes Wagner‘s Vorspiel, and von Trier employs it throughout the entire film. The choice seems odd; why feature music arguably about the greatest romance in opera for a film whose protagonist immediately realizes that she does not love her husband on their wedding night? In contrast to Wagner’s lovers, who risk and lose everything to be together, Justine, upon facing impending death, becomes curiously accepting of the doom the world will face by a meteor that is hurtling towards the planet.

Perhaps von Trier uses it as a distancing effect, to contrast the diegetic music of bourgeois wedding celebrations with the greater picture. Perhaps it represents the struggle of the protagonist against this entire worldview. It is undoubtedly one shaped by men (such as Wagner itself), and it is a world whose structures can only be resolved, not through the ecstatic climax of a single woman’s Liebestod or through Brünnhilde’s redeeming destruction of a ring, but solely through the destruction of the world itself by a meteor that appears to be a freak deus ex machine-like incident.