It would once have been odd that one
of the best films of the year is a horror film, but we are living in
a new Golden Age of horror, with movies like "Get Out," "Green Room," and "It Follows" exploring our darkest fears with great
stories and great acting. I wasn't so sure about watching the latest
from "Hereditary" writer/director Ari Aster. “Hereditary”
was ably-directed, and plenty scary, but in the end I found the story
didn't justify the gross-out scenes. Fortunately, for “Midsommar,”
Aster has learned to scare the audience with what is implied, with
just the occasional gore sprinkled in to remind us how fragile we
are.
Florence Pugh plays Dani, whose
emotionally-distant boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), is
considering breaking up with her. That gets put on hold when Dani is
struck by a family tragedy, and Christian winds up begrudgingly
inviting her to come along with him and his grad-school buds on a
summer trip to Sweden. The trip is ostensibly to witness a
mid-summer ritual at an obscure commune, and another classmate, Josh,
is planning to write about the event for his anthropology thesis.
Really, though, the plan was to do drugs and hook up with Swedish
girls, and Dani is clearly the 5th wheel on this trip.
The commune is an interesting place,
to say the least. The people, dressed all in white in honor of
midsummer, call themselves the Harga, and they greet the visitors
with hallucinogenic mushrooms. They are clearly an insular group,
but they generously welcome Dani, Christian, and friends to share in
their celebration. Dani, however, becomes increasingly unsettled by
the Harga, and sleeps poorly in the almost constant daylight of
Sweden's summer. It's not much of a spoiler to reveal that the Harga
are a pagan cult, and they have ulterior motives in welcoming
outsiders to their isolated community. Even if you didn't see the
trailer, you get quite a bit of foreshadowing from the various
artworks that appear throughout the film. The foreshadowing starts
on the walls of Dani's apartment back home, and continues in the
painting and needlepoint art at the Harga commune.
“Midsommar” is, at heart, a story
about a relationship, and Aster actually wrote it in the wake of a
painful break-up. I initially had some sympathy for Christian. At
the beginning, I got the impression that he and Dani had only been
dating a short time, and she WAS carrying a lot of emotional baggage.
Then we learn that they have actually been together four years, at
which point it is pretty messed up that Christian would forget Dani's
birthday, let alone that she would hesitate to ask him to share her
grief. Christian is the worst kind of lover, unwilling to invest
emotionally, but too chicken to break up and move on. “Midsommar”
is about Dani's alone-ness as she works through her grief and tries
to rebuild her life and her self. Ultimately, Christian is another
piece of baggage that Dani has to shed in order to heal and be free.
Florence Pugh is outstanding here.
Dani is a character who has given up on herself, wearing baggy
clothes and clearly not caring much how she looks. When she isn't
wracked by grief, however, her natural beauty shines through. The
actress is having quite a year. In addition to “Midsommar,” she
is in “Little Women” and the upcoming “Black Widow.” In one
year, she has done a culty, horror film; artsy, award-bait; and a
big-paycheck, superhero movie. This girl's talent agent is psyched!
The big innovation in “Midsommar”
is the trick of creating horror in broad daylight. The majority of
horror films make use of darkness, as we fear what we cannot see. In
the Harga commune, everything is brightly-lit, and if we and the
characters don't see something, it's because we are looking away.
The Harga make no attempt to hide the horrors there, and don't even
view them as horrors. In the Swedish summer, the daylight never
fully recedes, but there is still plenty to fear in “Midsommar.”
4 stars out of 5
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