Review: Ari Aster’s Midsommar Masterfully Feasts on Extremes of Feeling

Anybody who’s seen Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man or similar folk horror films will hardly be surprised by any of the plot turns in Ari Aster’s Midsommar. From early on, there’s no doubt that the pagan rituals at the film’s center will spell doom for the group of friends who visit rural Sweden in a quasi-anthropological attempt to observe a cult’s summer solstice festival. The film masterfully builds itself around the inevitability of a mass terror, aligning our foreknowledge of that with the anxiety felt by the main character, Dani (Florence Pugh), in the wake of a recent family tragedy. The result is a deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.

The humor comes mostly from Dani’s traveling compatriots: her longtime boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and his pack of grad-school bros, Josh (William Jackson Harper), Mark (Will Poulter), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Pelle is the increasingly untrustworthy native Swede who invites the others back to his homeland to witness his esoteric culture’s midsummer festival, selling it as a visit to a sexually liberated hippie commune. The three young men rationalize away obvious warning signs that Pelle’s white-linen-wearing relatives may be members of a dangerous cult rather than the libidinous European models of their imagination.

Mixing pseudo-intellectualism with male privilege, the three oblivious American men, at least when they’re together, constitute as murderable a pack of horndogs as has ever been assembled in a horror film. Aster plays their cringeworthy behavior for laughs, but the jokes never feel frivolous. Instead, the ironic distance the film’s humor maintains between us and the young men reinforces the sense of isolation we feel as Dani accompanies them—the sole woman in the group, wrecking their homosocial summer excursion.

Dani received a pity invite to join the group from Christian, a narcissist whose fragile ego prevents him from being honest with her or anybody else. Christian has long wanted to break things off with Dani, but instead of taking action on that front, he’s made himself emotionally unavailable and essentially trained Dani to blame herself whenever he betrays her trust or neglects her needs. In the wake of the family tragedy depicted in the film’s haunting prologue, Christian plans the trip to Sweden without telling Dani, then, without warning his friends, begrudgingly invites her when she finds out about it. Midsommar is, to a surprising extent, a film about a torturous breakup—an unsparing breakup film that offers no hint of solace, no hope that that life goes on after we’re betrayed by and severed from the ones we love.

Midsommar’s opening scene ends with Dani’s heartrending, anguished cries, which echo throughout the rest of the film. These are piercing screams that are rooted in unbearable emotional pain rather than overwhelming terror. The otherworldly experience of perpetual daylight and chipper pagans in rural Sweden exacerbates Dani’s clinical anxiety, but the film doesn’t turn her medical condition into a superpower that warns her away from danger, as a cheaper horror film might. As it becomes increasingly clear that the cult celebrates midsummer in a way that involves both death and arcane sexual practices, Dani’s initial panic is defused when kind-eyed, soft-voiced Pelle appears to offer her the comfort Christian won’t.

Shot, as Hereditary was, by Pawel Pogorzelski, the burningly bright imagery of Midsommar is as beautiful as it is distressing. Throughout, the camera and mise-en-scène are almost uncannily in sync with the viewer’s psyche, responding to and manipulating our attention with subtly unsettling compositions and precise camera movements. The film shifts between incredibly still shots, quietly observing the arrangement of dwellings and obscure structures in the cult’s colony, and grandiose camera moves—as in the crane shot that arcs all the way over the car as the group drives up from Stolkholm, ending upside down, with the hyper-bright Swedish summer sky on the bottom of the frame. The transition between stillness and motion is pitch-perfect, coming at the precise moment one wants to draw closer to things, drawing out our anticipation of the terrible thing we know we’re going to see.

Although methodical in his approach to pacing and structure, Aster is interested in extremities—visually, physically, and emotionally—and knows just when to deploy one to enhance another. Midsommar has gory stretches, and its matter-of-fact images of violent death are more than just shocking, as they intend to leave us with a lingering impression of a woman’s feelings of grief, separation, and loss. The film finds the perfect setting for Dani’s confrontation with her own disturbing memories in the permanent daylight of a Swedish summer: You see everything, it’s impossible to look away, and there’s nowhere to hide.