Compared to all of Todd Haynes's other films to date, Far from Heaven is the most straightforwardly generic. Assassins (1985) deconstructs the ‘period biopic’, in a manner redolent of Derek Jarman's film about Caravaggio (1986). As I have argued elsewhere, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987), despite its short running time, is indebted to a range of generic forms, including star biopics, disaster movies, documentary, horror, and ‘disease of the week’ made-for-TV movies. Poison (1991) has three separate narrative strands, each shot in a different idiom. The television short Dottie Gets Spanked (1993), made as part of the PBS series ‘TV Families’, is a period drama set in the 1950s, but one ruptured by perverse avant-garde dream sequences. Safe (1995) melds horror and melodrama in a form influenced by Kubrick, Antonioni, Akerman and others. The mixture of styles in Velvet Goldmine (1998) – social realism, pop promo, fantasy and science fiction, amongst others – is especially complex, as is that embodied in the multiple threads of I'm Not There (2007). In contrast, Far from Heaven is ‘merely’ a melodrama: specifically, a family melodrama indebted to those made in the 1950s for Universal by Douglas Sirk. Though Haynes had experimented with the effects of melodrama in Superstar and Safe, Far from Heaven is marked by a surprisingly rigorous adherence to the formal and narrative constraints of the genre.