The Grief Specialist

Kirsten Dunst and the Many Faces of Sorrow

Some actresses know very well how to disappear into sorrow, absorb the emotional logic of a character, and deliver a remarkably lifelike performance. Kirsten Dunst is certainly one of Hollywood’s grief specialists. In a career that spans decades, she has built a sustained, evolving study of female interiority when it has been broken by circumstance, psychopathology, loss, and witnessing. Four films in particular form an unofficial constellation — The Virgin Suicides, Melancholia, Woodshock, and Civil War — each mapping a distinctive psychological territory and demanding a different register of suffering, revealing what Dunst is capable of in terms of conveying a uniquely forlorn state of mind.