Friend said to me half way through that the movie felt like it was paced like a television show, no dead time, and unlike other, thirstier horror films, it contains no jump scares. Midsommar is aware of its eccentricities, is willing to split the audience between laughter and gasps (the moment when William Jackson Harper goes to bed with his tennis shoes on, some hero behind me told his girlfriend, “Dude’s ready to bounce,” and everyone in the theater laughed, despite our misgivings. The humor and drama of every high impact scene are skillfully regulated. Aster puts a lovely twist to the moment in every horror film when the main characters take it upon themselves to escape their present circumstances, when we the audience derive joy from their newfound agency and newfound horror from their failed attempts at escape as a result of that agency. Instead of escape, Dani’s form of agency comes from her falling deeper down the rabbit hole, giving our plot a different shape than usual.
Friend and I saw this last minute on Wednesday after getting back from showing Niece Stanford U. It is well-documented that I love Florence Pugh in all her glorious forms, even especially as an unwieldy flower dinosaur in this film. The trailer is pretty (&) trippy, and, after having seen the movie, does an excellent job of withholding details while showing everything. Director Ari Aster, who debuted last year with the memorably ambitious and uneven Hereditary, describes it as Wizard of Oz (my favorite film) on acid, which is all I needed to hear to be on board.
The flexibility of the horror metaphor is something that I’ve written about before as a quality of horror worth watching, and Aster’s Midsommar is of the top tier in this respect, a canny mix exploration of loss in both the extreme and mundane (suicide and relationship troubles). It has a more explicit interest in the psychology of the everygirl. Hereditary was a lot of things, but it leans hard on Mother-Daughter character tropes and doesn’t do much investigation into the goings on of twenty-something sexually active modern women. Midsommar by contrast seems engrossed in the different masks those women wear (sometimes literally and made of skin!), their hopes and dreams and fears, and the way that their anxieties bounce around and echo in other bodies. An empathic small town cult seems like a kind of perfect metaphor for social media without any of the clunkiness of actually portraying texting or swiping or sharing.
Speaking of leaning hard on things: if there is one indulgent vice of Midsommar, it is it’s reliance on a couple of shocking images that you’ll recognize when you see them for their shock factor. Rather than deluge the audience with fresh new horrors as discoveries multiply, the film circles back on the grotesque as a means of heightening emotional contrasts and indicating growth through time and imagery.
Midsommar successfully tops Hereditary, feels a lot more complete and contained than the sprawling plot of that first film. And where Hereditary really falls off the rails in the last fifteen minutes or so, Midsommar is more disciplined about its controlled blaze, its tone, and marking its choices. There are some moments when one needs to willfully turn off their brain in order to plow through to interesting moments: the commentary on depression and suicide is pretty fucked (which isn’t to say that Ari isn’t entitled to an elevated depiction of mental health, he clearly understands how to do nuanced). Much more satisfying is the way in which he removes and isolates our emotional lives from their cultural context, removes technology and Americana, and lets the characters forge ahead with more primal instincts. The director seems to have a knack for playing with the mundanity of our everyday demons, the ones we’re one pill away from.
Fuck Jack Reynor for telling you not to laugh. Go and laugh at whatever you want. It’s beautiful and scary and fun and funny.
Recommended reading: Dame Rebecca of Slate has written about the “mundanity of horror” we were talking about.
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