Summertime… and the living is… in doubt
We all look to the light for safety, for warmth, for life. Filmmakers use light to communicate safety or victory, and definitely health. In almost every hospital scene, convalescing characters lie in a bed, tucked safely in sheets, looking out to friends and family, as if to say, “whew … I made it. I’m alive. I’m here,” Hospital sets usually include rejuvenating daytime light cascading in from expansive windows.
All the more impressive, then, that Ari Aster’s ambitious, perplexing, unrelenting film Midsommar uses, abuses, and undermines light, to prove that dread can build in any season, horror respects no clock, and terror can strike on the brightest of sunshiny days.
Along with Jordan Peele of Get Out and Us fame, Aster, helmer of 2018’s devastatingly good Hereditary, has breathed new life into the recently revitalized horror genre. Peele’s efforts center on social commentary through character construction and interaction. Aster, on the other hand, is interested in zooming in and pinching out on the genre siblings of dread and terror, and constructing entire films around them that exhibit breathtaking and surprising control. His scripts and actors’ performances sometimes suffer, but the outcome is something to behold.
Midsommar opens not in bright sunshine, but late at night. A nearly panicked Dani (Florence Pugh) obsessively scans unresponded texts, emails, and phone calls to her sister. She compulsively replays voicemail, searching for clues, telegraphing increasing worry. To break the stress, she phones her boyfriend Christain (Jack Reynor), a nice enough guy with an easy manner, broadly set, placid eyes and a house full of roommates, some of whom are anthropology PhD students, who henpeck him into leaving her, to find someone who “actually likes sex.” Tragedy strikes, and Christian’s escape plan is put on hold. He flails and fails to address Dani’s grief, hastily inviting her on a trip with his roommates to a long-planned summertime Swedish escapade, as part of a vaguely-defined nine-day ancient solstice ritual of the ancestors of his always smiling, always sketching, and slightly unsettling roommate Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Grief and misplaced pity propel the two with Christian’s roommates to Hälsingland, in remote northern Sweden.
As they leave civilization, the group encounters an increasingly wild and thickly forested landscape. A clumsy banner strung across a dirt road welcomes them to the home of Pelle’s clan, called the Hårga. As he did in Hereditary, director of photography Pawel Pogorzelski deftly controls the frame. In Hereditary, he unsettled us and ultimately set the hook of dread through increasingly tight frames, shot mostly at low light levels and low angles. Here he works with contrast, both light and dark, and expansive and claustrophobic.
Before entering the village, the group pauses on a hillside to meet the clan and imbibe some local psychedelics. Pelle’s clan appear in ones and twos, dressed in embroidered bright white tunics, and dressed straight from a Michigan Nordic heritage festival. Pelle greets an old friend not with an expected hug, but by vigorously clasping the back of his head. Normally, a hillside dotted with flowers and Swedish flower children would read of welcoming and home, but this being an Aster film, something isn’t right, and we’re on the alert for danger. Dani and Christian’s awkwardness over taking drugs sets a tone of increasing anxiety and uncertainty. The group hikes through a dimly lit forest and eventually emerges through a crudely constructed sun arch into the piercing bright light of the village.
Bright midday light bathes buildings and villagers alike in shimmering golds and yellows. Villagers appear from all directions, arms spread widely, faces brimming with wide smiles. But as we take in the village, we notice that the buildings are oddly shaped. Summer here isn’t a time of sloth and Slurpees, but a period when many tasks much be concluded before the long winter sets in again.
Shots linger just long enough for us to register that something lurks beneath broad smiles and inviting gestures. Village elders greet our group, but seem to press them into one ritual after another. Matriarchal spokesman Siv (Gunnel Fred) exudes calm and generosity, but do we also detect him making other calculations? Others seem utterly at ease and entirely comfortable with themselves, but their piercing blue eyes pierce a little too deeply, their gazes upon the group held just a bit too long.
As an almost reluctant member of the genre, Midsommar must follow its conventions. So our ensemble of young, naive cultural adventures follows suit. Most notably, Will Poulter’s Mark would rather be at a Copenhagen pub chasing blondes and watching football, but can’t believe his luck (and shouldn’t) when he becomes the sexual focus of a village teen girl. And William Jackson Harper’s Josh is a woke culture warrior who’s stumbled upon the PhD thesis of a lifetime.
Aster is already a master structuralist, stylist, and tone master. As Midsommer progresses, it presents shocking images, which should send our group running for safety. But the clan’s backstory, the fervor with which the village adheres to its rituals, and the tenets of cultural relativism believed by the budding anthropologists, suspend their disbelief just long enough to become lulled into the increasingly bizarre, but somehow understandable worldview of the Hårga.
Production designer Henrik Svensson and costume designer Andrea Flesch spent many months filling in the world of the Hårga. Aster even created a runic alphabet that appears through sets and costumes. Casting directors Jessica Kelly and Jeanette Klintberg filled sets and frames with Swedish extras and bit players to set up an effective visual contrast with the American and British visitors.
But the film’s script is its weakest link. For all the realism, the imagined mythology, the wonderfully realized sets, and the well-chosen extras, Aster’s creative aim seems to be to construct a film built mainly to satisfy a seeming artistic lust to realize a number of terrifying situations, and surface a number of both truly horrific and original images. And also to set himself the challenge of making a horror film in bright sunlight. To do so he asks us to overlook some glaring plot holes and almost inexcusable character inconsistencies. Ultimately, we must choose between chasing down one after another inconsistency in the story and the characters, or just letting go and enjoying the sense of being immersed in an cinematic environment of exquisite control.
The press and early internet reaction to Midsommar has in some ways been as perplexing and fawning as the film itself. Aster has said that Midsommar is essentially a breakup film, but those themes are almost utterly lost amid the burden of telling the Hårga’s story and playing out a horror film. Also, Aster has said he found inspiration in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from Marriage and Albert Brooks’s Modern Romance. But the obvious and most telling comparison is to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man, and it’s odd that Aster would neglect to mention that film.
As with Hereditary, Midsommar climaxes in a way only an Ari Aster film can, which will leave audiences in need of some head scratching, some follow up discussions, and most definitely multiple viewings. I know I can’t wait to see it again.
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Midsommar opens today in Bay Area theaters.
