Midsommar: Relationship Horror
Ari Aster’s tribute film to 70s cult movies (it’s like The Wicker Man amped up by millennial angst) is at once calming and terrifying, built up around anxiety and yet so reliant on references that the result tempts to be laughed at. It’s a rollercoaster with come ups and come downs; it’s theme park horror.
The beginning favors cold exteriors, snowbanks, skeletal trees. It’s setting up the mind-space of Dani (Florence Pugh), whose agitated arguments with her sister’s answering machine ramp up in Pugh’s exhausted voice (she’s done with life before she starts: she’s an anthem to millennial fortune-telling). The change to sunny Sweden is like traversing the themed areas at Disney: one props up the other, keeping you entertained by magical contrasts. The sunshine and blatant skies promise peace, and Pawel Pogorzelski drop kicks you with enclosure, as restraining as the doll’s houses in his cinematography on Hereditary but with the sublime joke that he does so in the open air. He finds the enclosures in our faces, and that’s the magic of Midsommar.
Pugh assaults this movie with awareness. The cult community reveals its barbaric practices and she shudders like she’s never seen a horror movie, or never expected to be in one: she’s the powerhouse that keeps Midsommar going between predictable teen horror scenarios. Mark (Will Poulter) disrespects the community’s beliefs with unrealistic showmanship; Aster knows the character is so out there that he connives a way to leave him behind in dramatic moments, since Mark’s only reaction would be to ruin them. I’m thinking of the mutual suicide scene, which figures prominently in the movie’s romantic depression. Each skit is like a frame of a romantic fresco (paintings in the film recall Altman’s 3 Women to guide us through sexual symbology; it wants us to know that the movie is about the way we treat each other).
The entire film is really an extended breakup between Dani and Christian (Jack Reynor), two people who find in each other the weaknesses they can’t resolve in themselves. Neither knows how to stop taking the easy way out of their desires and this locks them into masochistic togetherness: they live the nightmare version of texting-age love affairs, where sharing more than 140 characters puts them in danger of falling apart. Does Christian deserve his ultimate fate? He deserves the fate of someone who uses others because he doesn’t know what he wants from himself.
There’s an oppressive orgy scene with old breasts dangling in rhythmic succession; someone in my theater laughed even as I winced. Midsommar is powerful enough to divide your emotions; it makes you want to do better in your own life, to avoid the horrors of the everyday. Aster’s gift is mixing those with flagrant movie references, familiar enough to produce smiles (Nic Cage’s bear suit from The Wicker Man remake shows up), and female faces powerful enough to make you cry. His people are so nice it would be a twist if they weren’t cannibal murderers. We have to be careful not to let them remind us of ourselves.
***
Image is a screenshot from the film.
