'Midsommar' (2019) Review
Florence Pugh Shines in Ari Aster’s Pagan Nightmare
Premise - “A couple travel to Sweden to visit their friend's rural hometown for its fabled midsummer festival, but what begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.”
Director - Ari Aster
Writer - Ari Aster
Noteworthy cast - Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, & Will Poulter
My thoughts - At its core, Ari Aster’s 2019 horror film Midsommar may seem like a story portrayed many times on the big screen. You’ve seen it before. A person “comes of age” by shedding someone important from their life, discovering their found family, and maybe even finding themselves along the way.
In the simplest of terms, a breakup movie.
Yet, Ari Aster does what only Ari Aster could do. He decides to take a common story beat and set it to the backdrop of none other than a Swedish death cult. That’s right. A cliff jumping, field frolicking, love spell casting death cult. One that he meticulously researches & spends significant runtime exploring. You become so ultra fixated on the rules of the colony, how they operate, and how they fit into the broader world that it wouldn’t be hard to lose sight of the central play.
It’s that tension between portraying this pageantry of the colony & portraying the humanity of Dani that makes Midsommar so special. The tension between Scandinavian socialism and American capitalism. The tension between community and isolation. If Aster goes all in on scientific spectacle or human drama, it becomes a completely different movie.
There are so many details and so much craft behind what Aster puts on screen in Midsommar that it’s inevitably going to take a few watches for everything to stick. Repeat watches are not only rewarded, but required to see the whole thing for what it is.
This time around I was drawn to how similar the inciting incident in act one is to the one in act three. Both are traumatic experiences that will alter the course of Dani’s life (losing her family & catching her boyfriend cheating on her). Both are immediately followed by a scene of her weeping uncontrollably. And what’s fascinating is not the inevitable pain & grief that comes after moments like that, but the question of who is around you to hold you are in that state? Do they want to be there? Do they feel your pain so deeply that they can’t help but scream with you? Or are they simply holding you because they know they have to out of obligation?
It’s all handled so masterfully by Aster. Chills during the opening. Chills when the opening credits hit. Chills when the boisterous score is booming during the final act. Chills when we see Dani smile. Chills all around!
One of the defining characteristics of a great movie (for me, at least) is that once the credits roll you immediately want to seek out every interview the filmmaker has done about the film.
Midsommar made me do just that (and think & feel plenty more).
Loved this line from Aster in an interview: “For the men, this is a folk horror movie. For Danni, it is a perverse wish fulfillment fantasy. It quite literally is a fairytale for her.”
Whether it is your first of fifth watch of Midsommar, if you watch it through this lens, I promise you will enjoy it even more.
How did it do at the box office? - Grossed $47.8 million ($27.4 million domestic) on an estimated $9 million budget
Did it win any Oscars? - No
Where to watch - Currently available for rent or purchase on VOD