The film about the end of the world paralleled with the emancipation from one's own depression as portrayed from the film's central character (Kirsten Dunst in a Best Actress for the festival worthy performance) is actually pretty tame by von Trier standards.
If the stars do align for certain Cannes V.I.P member filmmakers, 2012's festival might be one steamy event. We have Gaspar Noe who wants to return to the world of X and if Lars von Trier has it his way, his next project would cause a bigger media storm than the one we are already highly anticipating less than two months from now with Melancholia. Screen reports that the director might go with the idea/title of The Nymphomaniac over Dirt in Bedsores for "a film about a woman’s erotic birth, a woman who discovers her eroticism.”
Moving from losing your child, to the notion of losing the world and everything in it, Von Trier is in the challenging genre-types portion of his career if you pair this sci-fi, perhaps dystopian-utopian versed film with his version of a horror film in Antichrist.
Lars von Trier is taking on the disaster film genre on a micro-budgeted English-language project which will include a (no surprises here) a pessimistic ending. Planet Melancholia is due to shoot in Germany and Sweden next summer.