A Midsommar's Day Dream

When Ari Aster was 4, he sprinted 6 city blocks through New York after being spooked by the tommy gun scene in Dick Tracy. It was his first time at a theater, and it proved to be something of an oracle for the impact his own films would have on audiences years later. For the rest of his childhood, he chewed through the horror section of every movie store his parents’ car could reach and he went into film school with the sort of genre-immersion you’d expect from someone twice his age. Fast forward 15 years or so, and there is very little about how to scare the shit out of someone that he doesn’t know. His first 2 films, Hereditary and Midsommar, are genius and a scary script in his hands has started to feel like Bruce Lee picking up nunchucks. A brilliant revitalization of an aging art.

Aster described Midsommar in a 2019 Vox interview as “breakup opera” and that’s hard to argue with. It’s probably the most visually beautiful movie I’ve ever seen and 4 years later I still think about it on a monthly basis. And unlike Hereditary, which as an aside kept me awake for 2 weeks at a solo writing retreat in the woods afterwards, Midsommar makes it a little more clear that we are the frog in the pot. Central characters Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (someone else), whose relationship is the engine for the film’s narrative vehicle, are easy for all of us to relate to and it’s very likely that we’ve all been both of them at different times. And there is no obvious villain. The Hårga are an ancient people, or an ancient-feeling people, who exist outside of, or perhaps aside, conventional time and conventional space. They’re unmenacing and hauntingly pure, and Alissa Wilkinson is right to point out the Disney-like quality of the film's structure and tone. In some respects, you could say The Hårga are just Mufasa and Rafiki if The Lion King included details of their eating habits, and the visitors they host are just a collection of migrating fauna stopping by a watering hole for a drink.

There are two basic elements here that left a dent in me:

The first is the way Aster plays with perspective. There are three movies going on here, one from Dani’s point of view, one from the view of all her other travel buddies, and one from the view of the Hårga, and each of them moves on a harmonic natural cycle. I don’t want to blow up the word count here by going yard on this, but I went down a rabbit hole on how this takes place towards the end of Dani’s grieving cycle, the visitors’ college year, and the Hårga’s 90 year religious calendar before deciding it was too early in the morning to try to crack that all the way open. But suffice to say, the three body problem this leaves us with is what gives the work its real depth, as in isolation all three groups here are relatable, but when taken together prove impossible to discern in a strict sense.

The second is the journey the audience goes on while watching. Aster turns up the heat here a couple degrees at a time, and we find ourselves genuinely conflicted as the brutality of the central ceremony unfolds. Who we are cheering for strengthens over the course of the movie, as you’d sort of expect, but the ornate reductivism of the Hårga’s communal practices pulls at the threads of our own modern political and religious structures with great effect. Is there something different between the symbolism of the mandatory suicide here and the celebration of Christ’s required death? Should social norms be defined and protected by self-organizing micro-societies rather than a broader body politic? Are the old ways really worse than the new ways? This sort of confusion grows in lock step with the film itself, and by the end it’s easy to find ourselves smiling right along with Dani as her past life burns which perhaps is the real horror here.

The film’s message isn’t particularly profound, it’s easy to argue that anything is about everything if you want to and you could argue that a defining human characteristic is our endless struggle between Past and Possibility, but the delivery here is rich cultural text and the violence, both emotional and physical, acts as an unforgettable adjective for its foundational and unsettling truths: We all can drift easily into agreement with something morally shocking, and many of our own acceptable beliefs resemble ceremonial gutting instruments when held up to the light. And it’s arresting that almost every scene in Midsommar takes place during the day, leaving us to question more of what we’ve come to feel comfortable and neighborly with and less of what might be running around out there in the literal or figurative dark.

If you’ve seen it and want to watch a breakdown of all the weird details hidden in the movie CLICK HERE.