★ (1 out of 4 stars) - Through a few snapshots of comforting mundanity - the boys' scenes could be from a Judd Apatow movie, minus the laughs - we come to learn of Dani and Christian, a young American couple whose long-term relationship has started to crack. Spurred on by his friends, who find her too needy, Christian has already begun separating himself from Dani, for her part made anxious by her bipolar sister...
(1/4)
Director: Ari Aster | Producers: Lars Knudsen, Patrik Andersson | Writer: Ari Aster | Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Will Poulter | Music: Bobby Krlic | Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski | Editors: Lucian Johnston, Jennifer Lame
Through a few snapshots of comforting mundanity – the boys’ scenes could be from a Judd Apatow movie, minus the laughs – we come to learn of Dani and Christian, a young American couple whose long-term relationship has started to crack. Spurred on by his friends, who find her too needy, Christian has already begun separating himself from Dani, for her part made anxious by her bipolar sister who keeps sending ominous messages threatening self-harm.
Christian and his fellow anthropology graduates – he is studying for a postgraduate degree, loosely because he lacks a topic for his thesis – plan a trip to Sweden, to Hälsingland, to the Hårga, their friend Pelle’s ancestral commune. There’s an anthropological twist to the visit, but this lads’ trip is more about getting away for a while, in the company of drink and drugs and Sweden’s much-vaunted women. Christian sees the trip as a break from Dani which might induce more permanent separation. But when her sister commits murder-suicide, killing herself and both of their parents via some noxious gas, Christian feels compelled to invite Dani along, certain that she’s too shy and grief-stricken to impose but with inevitable results.
Sweden then and the Hårga’s traditional midsummer celebration become the intended site for a psychological struggle, a proving ground where grief and anxiety and detachment and duplicity will all come to a head. That’s the theory at least, but Midsommar – the second feature by Ari Aster, which has been variously described as folk horror and psychological drama but plays out as nothing so much as a folksy muck-around – proves psychically inept, constitutionally torpid, and interminably dull.
Taking place mostly in broad daylight, the first hour or so of Midsommar features one by-the-books hallucinogenic episode and a handful of deaths, mostly self-imposed. They’re easy to telegraph, in the latter instance offer a first clear look at the commune’s grisly ritual excess, and seek to shock not through suddenness or growing tension but through their grim elaborateness and images of extreme body mutilation shown up-close. Midsommar is more circumspect when it comes to sex, content to show tableaux depicting vagina, but keeping its sex scene broadly comic and the most intimate parts out of view.
Again and again Aster attempts to unsettle through long drawn-out silences, where the snap of a commune elder commands rapt attention among their followers and among the few Anglophone interlopers a tangible sense of unease, where there is hesitation bordering on confusion over mealtime, and through singsong that rises and falls and then palpitates and mimics strained breath. The unease is tangible because the situation – outsiders in a strange place witnessing strange customs – is obviously uneasy, and on numerous occasions the participants stay when they should have attempted to leave. But the devices used to conjure unease and anxiety and all of those stocks-in-trade of psychological horror feel generic and overdone and ultimately unsuccessful. Their repetition and length and very light comedy contribute to Midsommar‘s bloated run-time: lingering in the movie theatre becomes part of its chore.
Aster has a reputation for thoroughgoing research, but there’s nothing about this depiction of a Swedish midsummer that couldn’t have been derived from a couple of afternoons flicking through Wikipedia and a handful of old books: traditional costumes and table settings, a smattering of symbolism, an awareness of Scandinavian runes. Yet the movie’s failure owes less to a lack of anthropological detail than it does to a lack of artistic imagination. This is not the work of an auteur but a ramshackle compendium of things we’ve seen before. The Wicker Man and Rosemary’s Baby are obvious touchstones. The genre can often be fairly undemanding – how much in life is uneasy, how easy is anxiety to evoke – but its best movies conjure real atmosphere through strong characterisation and a sense of place. Florence Pugh gives a solid performance as Dani, tactile and wary though hamstrung by the role, Jack Reynor as Christian just about comes through, and there is self-styled retard-seer with blowjob lips which go sadly unused. But otherwise Midsommar‘s characters are cutouts, while most of its action is set in one bland field. The movie rests entirely on its concept: a psychological horror set in a Swedish commune at midsummer, and with that sorted it’s a game of filling in the blanks.
It is tenuous to the point of absurdity to see in the clumsy machinations of the plot any message of female empowerment: the Hårga is not clearly matriarchal, with male elders doing plenty of the greeting and coercing and much of the grunt work; Christian – whose relationship with Dani is shaky to start with, and the pair have never lived together and they are after all both young – far from receiving some cosmic comeuppance arguably ends up as the victim of female-on-male rape; and Dani despite her gurning apotheosis remains stranded. If Midsommar possesses a theme or leaves an overriding impression, it is not about gender politics, but about the straining and the suffocation and the isolation of grief, and about how grief can be transmuted in a group setting, not necessarily to favourable results.
Beyond its pan-Scandinavian sense of custom, its rote genre devices and bloated girth, does Midsommar at least tell us anything about modern Sweden? Perversely for a film that attempts to draw its menace from a static society rooted in a quasi-historical past, yes it does. It tells us that the Swedes like their lottery, and will shoehorn little balls into the most peculiar of slots, mimics their fondness for strangely-coloured saft, and shouts thanks for the boon of gene-boosting immigration. Sadly all these insights are best left unlearned: Midsommar is only worth the time for committed fans of schlock.
