MIDSOMMAR: An Existential Horror

My personal interpretation of MIDSOMMAR

Alissa Wilkinson

I think I wrote down “opera” in my notes during that moment; it immediately felt like I was watching a movie with an overture that describes what’s about to happen. Then the panels slide open on a wintry scene. So it felt very much like an opera.

Ari Aster

Good, that’s definitely how I see the movie.

Alissa Wilkinson

As an opera?

Ari Aster

As a big opera. A breakup opera.

This was the moment when my personal interpretation of Ari Aster’s new horror film, “Midsommar”, brushed up against the way the film’s creator saw it. It wasn’t until now that I noticed that, in the interview, Ari specifically says it’s ‘how he sees’ the movie, rather than making a statement about its meaning, which is the sign of, in my opinion, a very powerful artist who thinks of his art as existing outside of himself. And it’s empowering, knowing that he wouldn’t deny the possibility that it has other meanings, because the themes I thought it was exploring are hardly concerned with something as relatively mundane as a breakup. Take that particular perspective on breakups with a grain of salt; I’ve not experienced many.

I am very much of the opinion that, when it comes to narrative, beginnings and endings are the key. When I create, I know that those are usually the things that form the most directly in my creative mind. The journey there is important but that journey is usually born from a specific seed and it’s almost always the beginning, for me. And the ending is usually what I consider the coda. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on the recency bias but I don’t think that’s an unjust approach.

So let’s consider the beginning of “Midsommar.” It dedicates itself to the murder(?)/suicide of the family of the main character, Dani. It is, to me, still the most unsettling scene in the film. There’s nothing explicitly gruesome about the scene, other than perhaps the detail of her sister’s vomit as a result of the exhaust fumes poisoning her body. It’s the nightmarish detail of it; the hoses leading from the exhaust pipes that the camera follows, slithering through the entire home, eventually terminating thrice; two for the mother and father and one, duct taped directly into the mouth of the sister.

It’s unfathomable. Film has romanticized this particular method of suicide; characters get in a car in a closed garage, start the engine and then, if the director needs the emotional weight, we might see their dead body, perhaps a loved one discovering it. We are spared nothing in “Midsommar”. The film informs us that Dani’s sister engineered a particularly horrific, if bloodless, death for herself and her parents. The film implies, perhaps in a weak enough way to leave the audience unsure, that the parents were murdered. But maybe they weren’t.

Did Aster choose this scene and set it up and meticulously reveal it for shock? Yes and no. Aster is notorious for being willing to shock his audience with scenes that are also narrative and thematic beats. Rarely does a character die in his film without their death adding to or elaborating on the overall thrust of the film. And with the way the family dies, its unfathomable darkness, Aster elicits the question; how could someone do this? Like this? Why?

We don’t know. We never really know. No matter how much research, no matter how much we talk about it, no amount of psychology or psychiatry can really explain why some people kill themselves. Or why they choose to do it the way they do. Why do some people, who seem perfectly fine, execute their loved ones before turning the gun on themselves? These things happen, and we often have no explanation.

But it’s deeper than that. Dani’s sister was bipolar and Dani herself, despite the rational urging of her boyfriend Christian, constantly terrified herself with unbearable anxiety about her sister, who the film establishes has a history of threatening self-harm. How much of Dani’s anxiety is driven by the fact that she can never truly understand why her sister behaves this way? And how much of Christian’s frustration with Dani is the result of being unable to relate to her seemingly unjustified anxieties.

The film makes a point to show how seemingly intractable the emotional disconnect is between these people. Every character, in some way or another, is incapable of finding an authentic connection between each other. In particular, Dani is in a tortured place where she simply can’t shake the grief, understandably, but feels guilty for it, mainly because of Christian’s attitude. Her decision to go to Midsommar with Christian and his friends is somewhat of an inscrutable decision; is she hoping to escape the awful shadow of her family’s death or is she hoping that by going, she can hold on to her relationship with Christian? It might be both, but I don’t think it could be argued that she isn’t seeking release from her grief in doing so.

But there is no escape. Dani’s despair is not swayed, not by the drugs she takes at Midsommar, not by the unrelenting serenity of the Hårga, not by their horrifying rituals. There is a fleeting moment, during the maypole dance “competition” in which Dani loses herself. It’s the most insidious moment in the whole film, but we’ll come back to that. After winning the dance, Dani is carried away in celebration, only to return and discover the worst of all things; Christian copulating with one of the Hårga.

But this wasn’t a surprise to Dani. As soon as she heard the strange, distorted, chant-like sounds coming from the sex temple, she knew. She ignored the Hårga urging her to stay away, even though the did nothing to stop her. Something deep within her, that perpetually sad, dark thing, was telling her heart what was happening, and she couldn’t ignore it. It was a part of her. It controlled her. And after witnessing Christian’s betrayal, when her miserable reality came crashing back, it returned as a great monster leaving her paralyzed. And the Hårga collectively mirroring her?

It did nothing.

That’s the thing. When we see something suffering, our instinct is to empathize. To say “I know how it feels” because then we can say “it will get better” or “your feelings are valid” or “you are not alone”.

But it doesn’t work that way. You never really know how it feels. No one ever really does. Least of all the Hårga. The Hårga only had one way to bring respite to Dani and it was the most vile act of them all (again, I’ll address this at the end). When we see Dani again, she is encased in a ceremonial cocoon of flowers, atop a dais, occupying the most honored position the Hårga could offer, essentially being worshipped by this cult. Yet her frown is utterly excruciating. It is difficult to even look at. This is Dani’s aphelion.

And in this moment, the Hårga offer her the choice to sacrifice Christian. As many have pointed out, we aren’t shown whether Dani makes the decision. It’s an ambiguity that asks the audience to empathize with Dani; what do you think she chose? What would you have chosen? Most interpretations empathize deeply with Dani and see the decision to kill Christian as justified. And they’re right.

But there’s a persistent interpretation of the film’s final frame that I disagree with completely and utterly; Dani’s inexorable frown slowly transforms into a smile.

Some say that this is her breaking point; that the last vestiges of her sanity has finally slipped and this fire, or Christian’s death, or both, have made her happy. Many think that she’s simply happy because of Christian’s death, which is a kind of insanity in itself, but one that most empathize with, and I do to.

Except I don’t think that’s why she’s smiling. She smiling just because. Because the winter of her emotions have given way to summer. She is smiling because nature created that moment to let her smile. She’s smiling for no reason. Just like how her family died for no reason. Just like how the universe exists for no reason.

“Midsommar” is, in fact, existential horror. There are explorations of this throughout the film, but one of the stronger moments is when Dani first trips on mushrooms; as she sees the tree she sits beneath becoming something more than (or less than) a tree, the Hårga that brought her there, Pelle, explains that nature is a mechanism. That there is no imperfection in nature. That there is no imperfection anywhere. There is no food. There is no water. Life is not a cycle because a cycle implies movement and movement implies an end and a beginning but our reality is a holographic projection and human beings can scarcely grasp that illusion, much less the underpinning quantum mechanics that define the system that creates that illusion and time, the thing we think of as time, is very much just an anchor we use to escape being swept away from our minds.

Dani was always the May Queen. Pelle knew it. The Hårga had been searching for her the whole time. Pelle found her. It was prophecy. Everything the Hårga did was already set in motion, at the very first second of existence. The Maypole dance was a lie. A performance. It wasn’t a competition, Dani didn’t win anything. But for a moment, as Dani’s mind disappeared into the dance, as her consciousness gave way to the nature of her body, she escaped her awareness. She was free from the paradox of being human, free from the torment of the knowledge that her fate is inescapable colliding perpetually with the instinct to deny that fate.

And the Hårga knew that fate. They had a prophecy. There were no coincidences. It all happened as it should.

The beginning. The end. All of it. And that’s the worst of it all: even though Dani, now finally one with the Hårga, knew that it all had already happened, that it was all going to happen again and again, was smiling. Just because.

...It follows that it is not unreasonable to assume that in the mechanics of numbrs, the reproduction of the patterns of protists, the peace of lunar dust — there exists a secret plot to kill you.

Have A Nice Life — “The Unnatural World”