Midsommar (2019)
As if in a theater, a curtain sewn with folk-art patterns parts at the start of Midsommar. The painting reveals a misty scene, a wintry forest as an unseen voice sings a melody older than the trees. A piercing ringtone disturbs the idyll: cut to a snowy American suburb. Dani (Florence Pugh) is calling one of those homes, leaving a string of messages in the house of her parents. As the phone keeps ringing, the camera pans the interior past family photos and into the master bedroom where her parents lay in deepest sleep. There is a scary email on Dani’s screen from her suicidal sister: “Mom and dad are coming too, goodbye.”
The link between suburbia and the far north comes into play soon enough. Dani’s boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), tired of her neediness but unwilling to end it just yet, has a Swedish buddy, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), who invites a group of college friends to visit his home in a remote Swedish village. Christian, Dani and the gang think it’s a hippie commune and it seems that way at first, but it’s something more committed, more ancient. It’s the 1960s but BCE.
For a shorthand description, calling Midsommar a belated art-house answer to the British cult movie The Wicker Man (1973) will do. The new film is similarly steeped in The Golden Bough with its primeval lore of fertility rites and sacrifice, its eternal wheel of birth and rebirth. Midsommar moves at a deliberately arrested pace, slowly drawing significance out of every frame. The nearly suspended animation of the plot enhances the mounting unease and suspense.
At first, it’s all fun and magic mushrooms for the visitors. Writer-director Ari Aster has a good way with subtle psychedelia, distorting the visuals into good trips—and bad. All of Pelle’s villagers are garbed in white and many favor wreaths of flowers and greenery. Everywhere are runic inscriptions and more of that folk art; elaborate sets of gesture and melody are significant to the village cultists, but baffling to the little band of outsiders. There are maypoles and circle dances, quaint if it wasn’t all slightly weird, like the Holiday Folk Fair as choreographed by David Lynch.
Some discussion occurs midway about cultural relativism. Most of the visitors are appalled when two elderly villagers leap from a precipice to the rocks below and are finished off by celebrants wielding a giant wooden mallet. What’s worse about that than ending your life in a hospice with a tube up your nose? Christian and Josh (William Jackson Harper), both anthropology students, begin competing over writing their theses on the village. But Midsommar is billed as a horror film and village life looks more and more sinister the longer the visitors linger.
Midsommar includes many moments of gore, some of it appallingly imaginative, and lots of graphic procreative sex fueled by mind-altering potions and rhythmic drumming, changing and dance. Aster has created a self-contained world that reflects badly on the fantasy of Edenic primeval societies, but also paints a pretty glum picture of contemporary society.
