Yes, 'Midsommar' Is One Of The Most Fucked Up Films Of 2019... But It's Also One Of The Best

MIDSOMMAR

★★★★1/2

Ari Aster’s debut film, 2018’s Hereditary, was a journey into darkness, both figuratively and literally. Its evocation of familial dysfunction, trauma, and, oh hey, Satanism was told with a visual palette big on blacks, the whole production plunged into a Jungian shadow-world. For his follow-up film, Midsommar, Aster has made another bonkers horror-movie spun from psychological states, but the visual look is wholly different. This time, it’s a nightmare bathed in sunshine; full of high-key images, glowing over-exposure, white outfits, blue skies, and the unrelenting daylight of an Arctic summer.

Where darkness suggests ill to humans — both in daily (nightly?) life and as cinema viewers — Midsommar uses the clarity of its images, and the brightness of its light, as a form of great misdirection. In Jonathan Franzen’s latest doorstop novel, Purity, its WikiLeaks-style organisation is called the Sunshine Project, equating the metaphor of sunlight with that of revelation, secrets brought into the open. Midsommar’s great irony, and great horror, comes from the fact that everything plays out in the open, in the clear light of day. It serves as a false reassurance to the standard luckless young people abroad that are its horror-movie fodder. And for the audience, who knows that the guy who made Hereditary is out to fuck them up and over, it’s an amazing exercise in dissonance, and a bold, very-bright new cinematic vision.

Midsommar begins mid-winter, in darkness and snow and urbanity; and, again, squarely in the realm of family trauma, loss, grief. Florence Pugh, our protagonist, is caught in the psychodrama of her bipolar sister, who has threatened suicide, and sent an ominous email about the fate of her and their parents. Failing to provide much support at all is a distant, dude-ish boyfriend (Jack Reynor); who, amongst his friends, debates the dynamics of dependence, they all viewing Pugh as too needy, too crazy, a total drag. When this absent sister kills both her parents and herself, the mood is ominously set; and the opportunity for Pugh, Reynor, and pals (Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper) to ‘escape’ the horrifying milieu via an anthropological field-trip to a mid-summer ritual at a remote Swedish commune is, clearly, not going to be a cure-all.

Inevitably, all those things hoping to be left at home — grief, unattended-to trauma, relationship dysfunction, depression — come along for the ride. Problems are not something that can be escaped from, no matter how far you go, or where you take yourself to. Where they’ve taken themselves to is an off-the-grid commune in the middle of a fecund meadow in a verdant valley, filled with a sprawling ‘family’ of healthful Swedes who welcome the foreigners into their beaming, sunny cult.

Their mid-summer festival isn’t just about folkloric texts or al fresco feasts on long-tables or dancing around the maypole, of course. Soon, there’s ritualised suicides, orgies, and human sacrifices. The tone of Midsommar is at once comic and horrific, Aster pushing audiences to places so uncomfortable, and delivering revelations so outlandish, that laughter is the only response, a kind of coping-mechanism of disbelief.

It’s to the director’s great credit that Midsommar doesn’t just play like a more gloriously-baroque variation on, like, Hostel: a portrait of luckless Americans abroad, effectively satirising the fears and paranoias of his insular nation. Instead, it’s a film that once again interrogates the underlying anxieties of nightmares; at once a portrait of the horrors of prizing ritual and tradition, the fear of being trapped in a bad relationship, and the male anxieties of losing power and prominence.

There’s no clear parable at play, just a bunch of dark, disturbing, unsettling associations. Many may find it difficult due not just to its various terrors and provocations, but its clear lack of hero or villain, of an undeniable evil to escape or a simple morality to follow. Instead, it’s a film that plays on fears — mostly of the other — in a way that’s unflattering to viewers. Here, the ugliness of human societies, desires, depravities, and vanities is paraded in front of us, in the cold, clear, blinding light of perpetual daytime. A fitting cinematic analogue for a world in which the horrors perpetrated by humans are widely documented, disseminated via the ever-illuminated feed. This, of course, is the real horror. In Midsommar, as in the contemporary climate, there’s no darkness to fear, but no shadows to hide in, either.