Rated: R18+
Written and Directed by: Ari Aster
Produced by: Patrik Andersson, Lars Knudsen
Director of Photography: Pawel Pogorzelski
Editor: Lucian Johnston
Music by: Bobby Krilic
Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Archie Madekwe, Ellora Torchia, Hampus Hallberg, Gunnel Fred, Isabelle Grill, Lars Väringer, Henrik Norlén, Anders Beckman.
‘I’m sure it was just a miscommunication.’
Following the success of his debut feature, Hereditary (2018), director and writer, Ari Aster shares the same attention to the discord of strange ritual in a modern time.
The more ritual involved, it seems, the darker the deed.
Midsommar focuses on the pagan celebration and nine-day feast the small community of the Hårga partake in every ninety years: the purification ritual.
Before we’re introduced to the slow corruption (purification) of the idyllic village in Hälsingland, filled with wildflowers, people tending gardens, getting high on magic mushrooms and dancing around in white tunics, we see a relationship falling apart. We see Dani (Florence Pugh) clinging to the only stability left in her life after a family tragedy, Christian: her boyfriend who’s been thinking of breaking off the relationship for a year.
Christian’s mates don’t understand why he’s still with her.
All the boys want to do is live the life of students, go to Sweden to sleep with as many Swedish chicks as possible, while Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) shares the unique ritual of his home, a once-in-a-life-time experience with his friends while Josh (William Jackson Harper) writes his thesis about the celebration of the Summer Solstice.
So when Christian invites the distraught Dani to come along on the trip, the awkward tension of the relationship becomes the undercurrent of a journey that unravels like a bad trip. A trip that keeps getting darker played-out in the constant sunshine and reassurance of the Hårga explaining this is what we’ve always done. This is our tradition.
It’s the out-of-control pull of the constant bizarre behaviour of these villagers, that twists the perception, to see the warp of reality as the visitors are seduced into a culture so different to their own, to be swept along into the trance, helpless to stop what comes next.
It’s the subtle details that drew me into this new world, Aster and his creative team piecing together the culture of the Hårga based on James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough, paganism and the spiritual traditions of philosophers such as Rudolf Steiner. The team created a culture with its own language, history, mythology, and traditions. Bizarre and violent traditions with the added trip of seeing grass grow through feet, to see the trees breath; to see flowers open and close in time with a heartbeat.
There’s brutality and beauty, like the extreme of long nights and never-ending days. The beauty cloys. Like blood clotting. It’s too bright. The flowers are too pretty.
Yet, the ritual makes the violence seem natural.
‘It does no good, darling, looking back at the inevitable. It corrupts the spirit.’
The many shades of darkness and light are used like a theme through the film, like a reflection of the person telling a lie, the truth shown in the focus of foreground. Showing the shades of Dani and Christian’s relationship is these subtleties is the genius of the film for me – the deliberate pulling away, the discord when Dani tells Christian, ‘That was just really weird.’
And Christian replying, ‘Was it?’
Then there’s the artwork and paintings and symbols hinting of what’s to come in the story, making me wonder how dark the film will get.
However, I didn’t find the film too confronting, the film not horrific because the senses have been saturated with sunlight and flowers and flutes and song; like the characters, I felt a little drugged by the grassy fields, lulled into the natural progression of the wrongness because the village becomes closed-off, the modern world, shut-out.
Without the outside world to compare the behaviour, the ritual becomes embraced, so the violence doesn’t hit as hard. I guess making it all the more disturbing. But for me, more thought-provoking because eventually, all those subtleties add up to show an interesting truth of human nature.