Midsommar Review

In honor of the final week of spooky season, and before gun-jumpers across the world replace their Jack-o’-Lanterns with Christmas music and candy canes (I have strong opinions about people who play Christmas music before Thanksgiving – sorry, not sorry), I want to squeeze in a high-profile horror movie that actually came out this summer, owing its release date largely to its title and premise: Midsommar.  For those that recall, Midsommar is Ari Aster‘s second film after Hereditary, which I quite enjoyed and reviewed here, and for most critics it’s a film that delivered in the midst of high expectations, with Aster’s creative vision and leading actress Florence Pugh‘s performance earning widespread praise.  I’m here to add a dissonant voice to that chorus and (hopefully) explain why and how Midsommar is not remotely scary, and is in fact little more than a colossal letdown after months of anticipation brought about by missing its short theater run.  Warning – things are about to get spoilery, so if you’re planning on renting or streaming this, now is the time to click away.

The cast of Midsommar looking for an Uber back to the airport.

Midsommar‘s initial setup is undoubtedly conventional but holds a lot of promise as far as potential for genuine thrills go: we find Pugh’s character, a twentysomething mourning the tragic death of her entire family by suicide (an event that sets the tone for the film well in its exposition, I might add), accompanying her boyfriend and his fellow anthropology graduate students on a research trip of sorts to Scandinavia for a midsummer festival.  Upon arrival, and after some good-old-fashioned recreational drug use, the cast of intruders into the Harga begin dropping one-by-one and meeting various but typically off-screen demises.  Most of the unrest to be had when watching Midsommar seems to be driven primarily by the pedestrian fears of traveling in a foreign country, and also feasts on magnification of cultural differences (albeit truly disturbing and cultish ones).  In fact, it’s not going too far to say that most of the movie follows the following formula: something awful or gross happens – a brutal self-sacrifice of elders viewed nonchalantly by a village’s worth of people, the insertion of menstrual blood and pubic hair into the breakfast of a potential mate, things like that – and then anyone who’s alarmed is reassured that all is well, more often than not by the group’s seemingly well-meaning tour guide and former Harga member Pelle.  Everyone shrugs their shoulders, the cycle is then repeated, and eventually everyone has succumbed to Aster’s overly artistic slow-moving carnage.

You’re not imagining it – the liquid in Jack Reynor‘s cup looks a little redder than that of William Jackson Harper‘s (The Good Place) and Will Poulter‘s (Bandersnatch).

But it could certainly be argued that a lot of the death is invited by classic American arrogance or inability to adhere to ways other than their own.  While there are certainly vicious murders that are uninvited, peeing on a ceremonial tree upon which cremated remains of the elders are scattered is a pretty good way to get yourself skinned, and completely disregarding photography rules with regards to a sacred text is a pretty good way to get yourself whacked in the head with a mallet by the cult’s incest-created oracle.  That a lot of the presumably gruesome carnage happens off-screen is a good way to heighten tension simply by creating a larger realm of the unknown, but the main problem is that when any sort of knowledge about what’s going on in a commune where it’s always daytime is revealed, it just results in more confusion, at least in my case.  I’m willing to acknowledge that there’s a good chance that there’s a lot of Midsommar that I just don’t get, but I would also argue that there’s not much to be gotten from watching a bunch of women wail in unison on the ground.  You could probably claim that Dani has finally found a communal outlet with which to share her immense pain, or that the isolation of a society combined with the morbidity of an every-ninety-years killing spree causes some off-kilter things to happen, but I just don’t know.

This was apparently Midsommar’s climactic scene, at least as far as I can tell.

One of Midsommar‘s chief focuses throughout seems to be on the ever-rocky relationship between Pugh’s and Reynor’s characters, and at times this makes for semi-compelling character drama, but at the end of the film (starting with a wildly graphic and out-of-this-world bizarre orgy scene that takes things off the rails) it’s all blown up for spectacle, I think to make some kind of statement about feminism, but frankly it’s not even clear to me what the movie’s final point was if it had one.  Dani’s journey from grieving and unstable tagalong to May Queen willing to cast aside a pretty shitty boyfriend with absolutely no consideration for her emotional needs is probably designed to be empowering, and there’s no doubt a taste of visual beauty to be had in her throne and gown made entirely of wildflowers (completing her foreshadowed transition to “one with nature,” I presume), but the empowerment is at least slightly tainted by the fact that she has also completely lost her mind and is willing to not only endorse but preside over a sacrificial killing and burning to bring about the end credits.  In other words, Midsommar almost seems like it wants to be an especially twisted breakup movie instead of a horror movie, and maybe the issue is that that’s just not what I showed up wanting to watch.

Tfw you decide to ritually murder your boyfriend after catching him in the middle of a drug-induced orgy for the express purposes of procreation.

Looking back on my Midsommar experience, the scariest part of Ari Aster’s sophomore directorial effort is the fact that it centers itself around a group of graduate students who are all desperately trying to finish, or even just begin, writing their doctoral theses, and from my perspective, if that’s not terrifying, I’m not sure what is.  Aside from that plot element, though – one which shouldn’t be remotely fear-inducing to most audience members – Midsommar is mostly just weird, overly arty, and pretty boring.  In its best moments, it employs a brand of non-jump-scare cinema of the unsettling that’s similar to what made Aster’s Hereditary so great, but for the most part it’s a film that sees its rightfully successful predecessor as an excuse to make some off-the-wall story and aesthetic choices, resulting in a movie that’s unsavory in the way one could argue a horror film should be, but contains little visible substance and a stark lack of legitimate fright.