Midsommar

Ari Aster faced a tall order in having to follow-up his nightmarish critical darling Hereditary (2018), but he aced it with Midsommar, an ambitious emotional drama concerning a grief, trauma, and failing relationships told through the lens of occult horror. Full of mania, madness, and anxiety, the film tells a more straightforward story than Aster's debut, yet never loses that pervading sense of inescapable dread that Aster has already made his trademark.

Midsommar (USA/Sweden)
Released: July 3, 2019
Director: Ari Aster
Screenplay: Ari Aster

Tagline: "Let the festivities begin"

Cast: 
Florence Pugh as Dani Ardor
Jack Reynor as Christian Hughes
William Jackson Harper as Josh
Vilhelm Blomgren as Pelle
Will Poulter as Mark

Dani Ardor (Pugh) is an anxious college student in a declining, co-dependent relationship with her distant boyfriend, Christian (Reynor). After years of simmering discontentment, Christian is prepared to finally break up with Dani, but a shocking family tragedy leaves Dani gutted and alone, and Christian stays with her to lessen the pain. Several months later, Christian invites Dani to tag along on his guys' trip to Sweden, home of his classmate Pelle. Dani agrees and the five head out to Pelle's folksy hometown, a remote village in the far north of Scandinavia, as the villagers are preparing to hold a festival that occurs once every 90 years.

Everyone at the commune is very welcoming and kind, at first, but naturally as the vacation goes on, things become more strange, bizarre, and downright sinister. Unnerving rituals and eerie murals are only the beginning. It's familiar scaffolding for horror fans: loudmouth, horny Americans travel to rural countryside and get their comeuppance, and there are certainly stock characters at play here. The shitty boyfriend. The nerd. The pensive, cute "foreigner." Aster is aware of this framework, however, and though he may not transcend the template, he certainly makes it his own.

Much like in Hereditary, Aster explores emotional turmoil through grand imagery and twisted ideas, this time in specific regards to a doomed, toxic relationship. There's a tension here outside anything related to the physical safety of our core characters' stay in the village; a tension in watching both Dani and Christian continually postpone their inevitable breakup though it's clear to each of them that their time together has run its course. Neither of them can rip off the band-aid, and as viewers we know that the longer they wait, the more damned their fate. 

What's interesting with Midsommar is that the conclusion is foregone. From the moment our heroes step foot in Pelle's village, there's only one way this can end,but the art of the film is in driving us towards that inevitable ending while still somehow maintaining interest, dread, and tension. Of course, we don't know the specifics of how this will all play out, but we know that it will, and that question locks the viewer in a vice grip as we wait to see what sort of specific, disturbing violence will rule the third act. 

The symbolism can be a bit heavy-handed at times, though that may be because we get to spend so much time dwelling on Aster's foreshadowing. It's a long film, and there's lots of extended, lingering shots to give the viewer time to pick up on all the runes and drawings and murals that spell out what sort of danger Dani and the others are wading into. The camerawork in general is phenomenal, and the use of pastel and light to create such uncomfortable imagery is astounding. It's one of the few, great horror films that is truly both beautiful and terrifying at the same time. It's a film with a soul, formulaic and campy at times yet sweeping and vivid at others; a riff on The Wicker Man (1973) that morphs into its own gorgeous, demented creature that is at once lush and tranquil, jarring and fiery. 


Midsommar
5 - Totally Terrifying
4 - Crazy Creepy
3 - Fairly Frightening
2 - Slightly Scary
1 - Hardly Horror