Sophomore slumps are not a thing in 2019. Jordan Peele's Us and now Ari Aster's Midsommar are two of the best horror films in the last decade. Not always scary, but intensely uncomfortable and deeply disturbing, these two pictures complicate and renew existential horror as a sub-genre. They are also fascinating steps forward for our two newest horror auteurs. If Jordan Peele's first outing was a streamlined, economical dissection of modern race relations, his second was a scream of bloody fury against our racist country. If Ari Aster's first outing was a calculated, precise portrait of family disintegration and trauma, his second is a chorus of screams for newfound family (and still lots of trauma). Both second films pile on so many layers of significance they become consummate works of art, constantly offering new readings.
We begin Midsommar in the dead of winter. We don't know it yet, but the opening images are of a murder-suicide. We get the news later as we center our focus on Dani (Florence Pugh), whose sister committed the crimes. Suddenly an orphan, Dani despairs, hoping the arms of her boyfriend will comfort her. The aptly named Christian (Jack Reynor) does precious little to comfort her, as he doesn't much want to be in this relationship. In fact, for most of the first hour of this 140-minute movie, the film primarily works as a black comedy, showing the emotional violence we enact on the people we love and the people we don't. It's a skin-prickling hour of awkward silences, passive-aggressive conversation, and lots of male-driven micro-aggressions.
This might feel like an unnecessarily long intro, but really this is the meat of the matter. It's the horror of our daily lives, and how our relationships with people we love disintegrate. Existential horror, here rooted in the ties that bind us, often begins with sudden loss and continues with efforts by the protagonist to find a place in a community we don't fully understand. Dani and Christian are clearly not a good match, and both are to blame; because we are often restricted to Dani's perspective and given more of her story, she becomes our default protagonist and who we tend to sympathize with. After all, it's Christian who wants out of the relationship but stays, who schemes and manipulates her behind her back, who is unfaithful in mind if not anywhere else. Yet.
But his friends are heading to Sweden for a month-long getaway, visiting a peer's home: a commune nestled in the idyllic plains of Halsingland. One of them (William Jackson Harper) is working on his thesis; Christian hijacks that too, eventually. One of them (Will Poulter) is a lustful clown looking for as much Scandinavian action as he can get (note: he doesn't actually get any that we see). While there, they will be the guests of the Harga, a community of nature-worshippers living out of time and place. Dressed in white robes -- "hermaphroditic" one calls their androgynous garb -- they decorate themselves with ancient runes and wildflowers, dance in the fields, and consume hallucinogenic roots and fruits around their valley.
It sounds a lot like paradise, and for most of the film, it is. This part of the story gets far more difficult to discuss unless you are familiar with The Wicker Man, from which Aster clearly takes his inspiration. In that 1973 classic, a detective investigates a missing woman in a cult, only to find himself the unwitting sacrifice for a pagan ritual. In Midsommar, we know exactly what will happen the whole time -- very nearly the same thing, but importantly different, as we will see -- and the horror comes from a plodding pace from which we cannot escape. It's an organized nightmare; no, daymare, really, as everything is doused in brilliant white light the entire time. Think Insomnia but less Al Pacino and more grass. Here, the students visit hoping to learn more, but find themselves part of the ritual; Dani, however, becomes the May Queen, and thus finds a new family as she takes a perverse revenge against her boyfriend.
It's all rather difficult to discuss, and I know I'm not doing it any justice. It's an experience you have to, well, experience to understand. And even through experiencing it, you don't understand. Nothing is explained, and very little makes concrete sense. You go through the film feeling everything, from the incredible score (half of which is diegetic) to the whirling, acrobatic camera. The extreme closeups on Florence Pugh's face force you to feel her virtuoso performance, and the bright sunlight bleaches everything so much that you're not always sure if what you see is a special effect or not.
With pacing akin to that of an opera, Midsommar stands apart from its ilk in its acute attention to internal emotion, its alarming color scheme and lightscape, and its amazing array of thematic concerns. This is a cornerstone of the genre, a magnificent achievement that is, sure, less entertaining than Hereditary, but infinitely more detailed and disturbing.
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