Ari Aster (2019)
The Swedish festival at the heart of Midsommar takes place once every ninety years. The writer-director Ari Aster, alas, is making films rather more often: I saw this one almost a year to the day after Hereditary. In that movie, Aster couldn’t wait to get the spooky horror underway and the early stages of Midsommar suggest more of the same. The build-up to and visual confirmation of the family tragedy that overwhelms the young American heroine Dani (Florence Pugh) are emphatically macabre. When the action switches to Sweden, as the car carrying Dani, her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and their friends to the festival approaches its destination, Aster shows the surrounding landscape – presumably from the visitors’ point of view and even before they’ve partaken of magic mushrooms – literally upside down. This premature hyperbole turns out not to be a taste of things to come. Aster rations the gory, supposedly scary highlights but that turns watching his second feature into something like watching a good many musicals. You sit waiting for the latest longueur to end, the next big number to start.
While it comes as no surprise when the smiling Swedes who welcome the newcomers are in due course revealed to be members of a lethal cult, the scheduling of their summer solstice celebrations was still a mystery to me at the end of Midsommar. The various rituals begin with a couple of early senicides and climax in the impregnation of a young virgin by an outsider, followed by a few more human sacrifices, including most of the tourists. Is that enough new blood to keep this rural community and their crops going for the best part of a century? Besides, there’s nothing in the locals’ behaviour to suggest a sense of awestruck privilege that they’re participating in an event so exceptional it can’t be even described as a once-in-a-lifetime experience: the community, we’re told, believes the natural span of a human life is seventy-two years max.
Does that mean they’re killing off their senior citizens as standard practice – that when two oldsters plunge to their deaths from a clifftop (one of the pair doesn’t die immediately and has his skull crushed with a mallet to finish the job properly) this is just a more spectacular way than usual of doing things – a festival special? Is the ninety years thing a front for cult crimes that are actually happening quite frequently? In that case, why hasn’t the disappearance of previous visitors to the area been noticed or investigated?
Aster’s debts to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) are clear enough, though. (A major difference between the two films: at 147 minutes, Midsommar lasts a whole hour longer.) In The Wicker Man, the police sergeant ritually sacrificed to the islanders’ pagan Celtic gods to ensure a successful harvest, is a devout Christian and a virgin. Those two things are now such an unlikely combination that the best you can do is give the corresponding character the culturally significant name Christian; and have him, like the sergeant, finally imprisoned in an edifice that goes up in flames.
This Christian is not a cop but a graduate student in anthropology, as is his friend Josh (William Jackson Harper). It’s their fellow student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), who invites the two – along with another classmate Mark (Will Poulter) – to visit Sweden and witness the midsummer celebrations in Pelle’s native community – the Hårga, in Hälsingland. (The former is fictional, the latter a real province of central Sweden.) The tensions that flare up between the two anthropologists because Christian decides to copy Josh’s Hårga subject matter are resolved when it’s decided they’ll write a thesis together. Decided, that is, not by their university but by the Hårga elders, who also stipulate the thesis must contain no names, geographical details or photographs. Ari Aster must think an unsubstantiated academic thesis is as easy to get away with as a lazy, ridiculous screenplay. Not that this particular contribution to extending knowledge ever gets to examination.
To be honest, I went to see Midsommar only because Florence Pugh was in it. Although Ari Aster has cause to be grateful to her, Pugh’s talents also make matters worse. This young actress, regardless of the role she’s playing and its context, is able to make you believe in what a character is experiencing emotionally. The impact of this is particularly strong in the early scenes here. We’re immediately caught up in Dani’s anxiety about her bi-polar sister – the tenor of her recent emails, her lack of response to Dani’s urgent phone messages. When she learns the sister has not only committed suicide but killed their parents too, Dani’s anguish is upsettingly credible, in spite of Aster’s insensitive staging of the death scene. The longer-term effect of Pugh’s dynamic realism, however, is to underline how overscaled is the wintertime trauma that leaves Dani badly in need of a summer holiday. If she’d already been an orphan and the sister had taken her own life, the disaster might have been closer to the right size. As it is, the tragedy and Florence Pugh’s reaction to it leave too strong an impression – they cast a long shadow over the continuous sunlight of Scandinavian midsummer and the increasingly daft happenings at the festival. If Dani more or less forgets what happened to her family, it’s only because Aster does.
Instead, we’re meant to see the failing relationship between Dani and Christian as the seminal aspect of the American prologue – partly because, according to Wikipedia, Aster himself ‘had experienced a difficult breakup’, partly as another piece of opportunistic misandry. Her understandable preoccupation with her sister makes Dani not the easiest person in the world to be in a relationship with but Aster, from the start, has it in for Christian and his pal Mark (Will Poulter), who urges him to dump Dani. Christian stays with her not out of love but through lack of nerve to do otherwise. The imprint of this arrangement hasn’t a hope of matching the emotional force of the deaths of Dani’s sister and parents.
Although the film itself seems liable to vindicate Americans who don’t hold with foreign travel, Mark’s other function in the story is to illustrate the typical cocky, ignorant Yank abroad (he can’t even understand why it’s still light late in the evening in Sweden). Christian reflects an essentially similar national self-confidence less crudely and Jack Reynor does this well. The die is cast for Christian, though, from the moment we learn that the maiden Maja (Isabelle Grill) fancies him as a suitable candidate for getting her with child. Reynor merely looks glum for most of the second half of the film, as if weighed down by the knowledge of what he’ll eventually be required to do: (a) penetrate Maja in front of a large audience of naked female cult members; (b) run starkers round the festival area, with his hands over his privates; (c) lie inside a disembowelled bear, waiting to be sacrificed.
The Hårga make a total of nine human sacrifices to their sun god(s), including at least four locals and at least four outsiders. It transpires that Pelle and his brother Ingemar (Hampus Hallberg) lured to the festival, respectively, Christian et al and a couple of British youngsters, Connie (Ellora Torchia) and her fiancé Simon (Archie Madekwe). Those two are done away with at quite an early stage. Mark, who offends by urinating on an ancestral tree, and Josh, who sneaks into a temple and tries to photograph a sacred runic text, follow soon after. The idea that they fail to respect Hårga cultural proprieties is a red herring; the locals need at least four sacrifices from the outside world and have only six people to choose from. Connie’s and Simon’s only transgression seems to be to want to leave the place once they’ve witnessed the senicides.
Dani and Christian show a remarkable lack of curiosity about the fate of their companions. Perhaps it’s the effect of the drugs they unknowingly take, more likely that the incuriosity isn’t the characters’ but the writer-director’s. (It’s hardly a question of whether Aster has any feeling for the people he puts on screen; he doesn’t care whether his audience has any feeling for them either.) The first two local sacrifices are the geriatric suicides. The next two are Ingemar and one of his pals. They’re selected by lot – balls spinning in a drum, à la FA Cup draw or the National Lottery (‘It could be you …’)
Florence Pugh is very strong in a sequence in which Dani takes part in a dance-till-you-drop competition with young Hårga women: her growing euphoria as she stays in the contest may be thanks to the psychotropics her hosts administer but Pugh gets across a powerful sense of Dani’s temporary sense of liberation and abandonment to the dance. She wins the competition; her prize is to be crowned May Queen (which suggests a different festival but let that pass). It’s the Queen’s prerogative to select the final human sacrifice Dani chooses Christian, having happened to look through the keyhole of a building as the ceremonial impregnation of Maja was taking place inside. Dani decides Christian has betrayed her and this is the only way she can get her own back.
Since Christian was drugged before being taken by the elders to have sex with Maja, this seems a bit unfair. On the other hand, we know he was too weak to finish with Dani back in America so it’s his fault she came to Sweden anyway. So, yeah, serves him right! In the closing stages, Florence Pugh is virtually submerged by the huge robe of flowers in which the Hårga dress their May Queen. Only her face is visible and, as Dani reaches the verge of psychological collapse, it’s the face of a petulant, tearful child. But when she contemplates the conflagration of the temple and the human sacrifices inside it, her expression turns to a mysterious smile. Except that it’s not really mysterious: female empowerment on screen can happen in the strangest circumstances.
I’m making Midsommar sound more energetically offensive than it mostly is. There are long stretches in which the viewer comes close to sharing Dani’s and Christian’s zonked stupor. Aster and his DP Pawel Pogorzelski make the most of the high-latitude summer solstice, slightly exaggerating the brightness of cloudless days and white nights so that this viewer at first felt he needed protection from the glare. Once you get used to the effect, however, it becomes a tiresome idea rather than a visual challenge. It’s unusual to say of a horror movie the sets and costumes were nice but it’s true in this case. The folk art decoration of the building interiors, the community’s white garb and the women’s floral chaplets are the best things to look at.
The walls of the temple where the victims are prepared for sacrifice are more worrying, though. The symbols painted there somewhat suggest swastikas. With the Hårga into heliolatry, that seems fair enough but I hope it doesn’t give ideas to people who think Ari Aster’s films have to add up to something more than meets the eye. Such ideas led to praise for Hereditary as a searing account of the breakdown of the American nuclear family. The cult members’ hyper-Aryan looks and the final hint of holocaust could encourage similarly extravagant inferences from Midsommar. Let’s look on the bright side, though. We’re told that Josh, once he’s completed his observations of the Hårga, is heading off to study similar ‘community traditions’ elsewhere in Northern Europe. Josh is the most conscientious and least dislikeable of the young men in the film. In a way, it’s a shame he’s taken out as soon as he is. But at least that would appear to reduce the immediate threat of Midsommar sequels set in England and Germany.
10 July 2019
