Midsommar

Midsommar

2019

Director- Ari Aster

Cast- Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Will Poulter, Isabelle Grill

           

 

This tale of folk horror is brought to us by Ari Aster, the director of 2018’s Hereditary.  In both films the protagonists are women who are suffering from grief caused by a horrific death. Otherwise, the two movies are very different. Hereditary was genuine supernatural horror with definite evil forces at work. In Midsommar, the antagonist is powerful religious belief.

A cursory glance at the movie will make you think of The Wicker Man, and that is not an unfair comparison. Both focus on an outsider confronted with Paganism. The Wicker Man is more Celtic and this more Norse but that is a slight difference. In The Wicker Man, however, the true nature of the horror is not evident until the climax of the film. In Midsommar, thanks to plenty of foreshadowing, it’s not hard to guess what’s going to happen. The only question is when.

Dani (Florence Pugh) has suffered a terrible tragedy. Her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor) is looking for an excuse to leave her but just can’t seem to follow through. The two of them end up on a trip with Jack’s fellow doctoral students and a foreign student who invites them to a summer festival at the commune where he grew up.

It will come as no surprise to the viewer that this commune is more than just hippies practicing free love. They practice the old religion where sex and death were more powerful forces than scripture and hymnals. The group arrives at the start of a week-long fertility festival. The first thing they encounter is the voluntary ritual sacrifice of two elderly people. They may be freaked out, but they stick around because, hey, they are doctoral students and they need to do their thesis on something right?

The movie moves along at a slow pace (some might say ponderous pace, but I would say deliberate pace). Its nearly 2 and a half hours long so you get your money’s worth. It features plenty of disturbing elements (at least for our 21^st century sensibilities); human sacrifice, ritual deflowering, planned inbreeding, sympathetic magic. Of course, these things were all a part of our heritage in the not too distant and conveniently forgotten past.

If the movie has one flaw it is that Dani is the only person with which the audience can empathize. Her boyfriend seems to be a selfish narcissist. One of his friends seems to be equally narcissistic and the other friend is the stereotypical rude Ugly American. With them being so unlikable, it’s not really horrible when something horrible happens to them. You’re kind of glad.

Though folk horror, the movie reminded me more of the cannibal movies of the 70s and 80s; isolated characters, the frailty of the human body on display, revolting gore presented almost clinically, and people connected to nature in a sinister way.

I always say that good science fiction makes you think and good horror makes you feel. That feeling however, is not always fear. Sometimes, it is confusion, sometimes unsettled and sometimes disturbed. Midsommar delivers all three.