Just a year after his breakout hit Hereditary, director Ari Aster is back with this movie, which is somewhat like a Wes Anderson-style comedy if Anderson descended into a serial-killer-style mania. There are gonna be spoilers in this one, so tread lightly.
Director: Ari Aster
Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor
Midsommar is about a bunch of kids going to Sweden for one of the guys, Josh, to do a thesis on European traditional ceremonies. Josh is played by William Jackson Harper of the Good Place, which is a fitting casting if I ever saw one. Also, the guy from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the eccentric game developer, is in this too, as a womanizing idiot, so that was fun.
The central act is the relationship between Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor), who are not really vibing with one another and he wants to break up with her. Unfortunately, an all too common occurrence happens when Dani’s mentally unstable sister kills herself and their parents with poisonous gas, thus making it inconvenient for Christian to break up with her. Bummer! It’s weird that the movie made the sister bipolar. That’s not a good message to send at all. But it did top the ‘child severed head’ scene from Hereditary that shocked the fuck out of me last year – god, it’s awful to watch.
So Dani, who the movie implies has always been somewhat anxious and needy, is now understandably traumatized and depressed. Pugh does an amazing job at conveying this character. Easily in the same class as Toni Collette from Hereditary – he’s got a knack for working with killer actresses and they all do amazing shit.
The movie unfolds at a pleasantly lackadaisical, molasses-slow pace that I think works for it. Most horror movies are like 85 minutes and barely waste any time getting to the point. That’s great when they’re good. This works because it takes its time and lets you immerse yourself in these strange, rolling green fields, these chipper white-clad Swedes in the countryside, the sort of glimmer of unease that grows as the movie goes on. Everything is shot open and wide, and it gives the movie a different feel than the pervasive shadows and quick cuts of other horror movies. The characters are goofy and not all of them given much development, but they’re acted well and seem believable as these chumps who wandered into a bizarre situation.
I think it’s strange that this is a 2019 movie using the old “look at how creepy these foreigners are!” trope. I really thought that had died off. But then again, nostalgia is big these days. There’s a scene where the villagers take two old people and have them jump off a cliff to their deaths and then when one of them survives, they take turns bludgeoning his face in with a giant mallet. They didn’t know this would be jarring to people from America or other countries? Pretty hard to believe. I mean if they’d had a demonstration where a cop shoots an unarmed black person, I could understand, but this is a bit much. It is a creepy scene though.
Also I take issue with the one Swedish guy, Pelle, who was their friend back in grad school in the US and hooked them up with the gig. He apparently was in on the whole thing and was a big part of the others getting killed or sucked into the cult lifestyle of this countryside coven. What was the plan there – he went across the ocean, enrolled in grad school, took classes and met friends with the sole, long-shot hope that he’d be able to find some guys who wanted to do a thesis on European Midsommar traditions so he could sacrifice them to his weird gods? Seems like that was a hard bargain. Glad he was able to do it. You can accomplish anything with determination and somewhat implausible writing! All of them end up dying – so I hope that grad school money this guy wasted was worth it, since he can’t go back now without facing questions about it!
But even with those misgivings, I was sucked in. I loved the surrealistic, rolling wave of this film, which just sucked me in like some 1950s Blob type abomination. The complete absence of any outside world was entrancing. The little details, like when Dani hallucinates her dead family in momentary glimpses, are like icing on the cake. God I love that type of shit in horror movies – the little details that creep up on you. The movie’s slow, weird pace makes it so that the scares come random and unpredictable. It’s a bizarre, circus-like experience, the daylight making things off-kilter, the benevolence of the Swedes being genuine at times but quick to turn against the characters, creating this really paranoid atmosphere.
The metaphor of the whole thing is the dissolution and death of the relationship. Every conversation Dani and Christian have is fraught with weight and trouble. They’re never quite at ease and always a bit out of sync. They never seem to have a moment where it isn’t a chore for them both to interact, it seems, and anybody looking at them would probably think they were about to break up. He stayed with her through the awful tragedy, but at his core he just isn’t into this anymore, not by the time they make it to Sweden for sure. He doesn’t consciously cheat on her but doesn’t stop himself either, when the villagers nominate him to fuck a teenage girl to impregnate her and carry on their lineage. Could’ve probably protested a little more, there, bud.
But Dani sees them through the door and that’s that. She’s distraught and can’t forgive him – the relationship is unceremoniously done, in an ugly manner, but one that’s all too common. No more bones about that.
The ending comes with no more ambiguity as they vote to sacrifice a bunch of people, mostly the foreign main characters, to their weird old gods (don’t let them hear me saying that though). They nominate Christian to be the one who they paralyze and put inside a hollowed-out bear carcass as they burn him alive. What a day! There’s a good shot at the end of everyone screaming and it’s about as good as this ever could’ve ended, I suppose. I like that they don’t even try to put on an appearance that this is anything but horrific anymore. So much for trying to appeal to the outsiders, I guess.
Midsommar is a weird movie. Not without its problems, but Aster is a killer talent of a director and there's enough good here to make it well worth seeing if you're a fan of this new wave of horror movies and aren't resigned to only the classics. At the least, it’s a hell of a tourist pamphlet for those wanting to visit Sweden!
Image copyright of its original owner; I don't own it.
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