A Year Later: Midsommar is a lucid, fantastic, and at times agonizing re-watchable film.
Ari Aster trojan-horsed a relationship melodrama into a hallucinogenic nightmare horror film. Is it scary? Not necessarily in the way you might think.
“It does no good to dodge, lash out at the inevitable. It corrupts the spirit.” Admittedly, it’s not the best thing to hear after watching two people explode as gravity pulls them into a rock, but in the context of Ari Aster’s Midsommar it oddly is one of the more comforting statements you can hear. When the Midsommar was released, it wasn’t marketed as an examination of two characters in a deteriorating relationship. Rather, it was presented as a traditional horror film: A gang of raucous American teenagers travel to a foreign land and meet their demise at the hands of a bloodthirsty cult. While that pitch is not entirely inaccurate, it also doesn’t give the craftmanship of the film its full due. The reality is that Midsommar is a deep evaluation of poisonous relationships and the damage that can be inflicted if unchecked; the horror elements of the movie are background noise. What makes Midsommar so unique is not just the movie itself, but how cohesively Aster was able to bake one movie into another and still create a complete dish, even if it is tough on the pallet at times. Basically, Ari Aster created an interesting, in-depth arthouse movie about relationships and disguised it as a horror film.
The pagan-cult horror element works as a catalyst keep the plot moving rather than real horror, the horror of virulent codependency. Hereditary, Aster’s previous film,followed a similar playbook. Traumatic and paranormal events tear at the seams of a family barely holding together. But while Hereditary feels like two separate movies at times, Midsommar feels more like a complete body of work. The scariest part of Midsommar is arguably the first 12 minutes. The story begins with incredible pain. Our main character, Dani experiences the worst conceivable trauma that any of us could imagine. She gets a call in the middle of night about the death of her family; her sister had killed them in a murder-suicide. It feels like a punch to the stomach, and you feel the weight of the scene with Dani writhing in pain from the grief and confusion of what had just happened to her. It’s an extremely hard scene to watch, and the emotional tax you have already paid is hefty considering it’s before the title card. What is also impressive about the first 12 minutes is not only the knots it creates inside you for the rest of the movie, but also the amount of exposition effortlessly weaved into that scene. We get a clear picture of the status of Christian and Dani’s relationship, from their conversation on the phone with each other and their respective conversations with their friends. Nothing after the beginning sequence in the movie ever feels right. The rest of the movie feels like a lucid dream that deteriorates into a fantastical nightmare. Midsommar is never “scary” in the way we think about scary, but it is disturbing. The vibrant colors and Swedish countryside give off an ethereal glow. Even the villager’s faces are warm and welcoming. The village feels like a dream, with vivid colors and radiance beaming from every smile, in contrast to the beginning of the film that begins in the heart of winter and most scenes are shot in dimly lit North Atlantic apartments.
The strained relationships between the characters stays at the forefront of the film. While the tension with the unpredictable nature of the commune gets explored, Aster brings our character’s relationship problems back into the forefront before we get too entangled into the commune’s schemes. The awkward nature of Dani being involved on this trip, Josh and Christian fighting over their stake on a thesis topic, as well as many tense moments take the focus of our characters and allow them to block out the unsettling events happening around them. We understand the toxicity of Dani and Christian’s relationship. But Josh, Mark, and Christian also see their friendship crumble under the pressure of the prolonged sunlight during the summer months, which makes the audience question whether they were even good friends to begin with. The strength of their bonds are tested when pressure is applied, and the pressure is being applied from the horror aspects of the film.
In the end, the scariest parts of Midsommar aren’t the parts that audiences have traditionally associated with horror films. Sure, there are moments of visceral gore and the general unsettling feeling of being around a cult, but the human elements of Midsommar are the most effective.The emotional trauma of a family tragedy, the cringe you feel being around a bad relationship, and watching the thin surface of friendships crack under pressure are all horrors that most people have experienced at one point in life. Midsommar can be an uncomfortable viewing experience at times, leaving a nauseating feeling in the depths of your core that can leave you confused or exhausted. Midsommar is still a wonderfully crafted film, and it provokes the conversation on how directors can use the marketability of big box-office genres to make the deeper arthouse style movies that they want to make. This film is fantastically creative and has a lot of aesthetic ingenuity that cannot be overlooked. Midsommar is an absolute re-watchable, if you have the stomach for it.
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