Have you ever been in a place very far north or south during the months when the sun barely sets? Unless you’ve already grown used to it, it’s both beautiful and frightening. In the unending daylight, brains accustomed to resetting themselves when it gets dark start to fuzz out confusedly; basic concepts on which our bodies depend, like time, no longer make a fundamental, corporeal sense. It’s disorienting and eerie, lending an otherworldly quality to everything. The last time I was in Iceland, in early July several years ago, I understood why talk of the existence of fairies and gnomes persists there.
Ari Aster’s Midsommar, a confidently directed and operatic follow-up to 2018’s Hereditary, situates its tale of grief, breakups, and rites in northern Sweden, at the height of its endless sun season. It’s a smart choice for the story he wants to tell. Midsommar is obsessed with the passage of time and the cycle of seasons, and the ways humans scramble to make sense of life’s big changes (like death, aging, and breakups).
As it turns out, neither the modern approach of treating changes like tragedies to be mourned nor the more ancient, even pagan instinct to memorialize them with rituals and acceptance is more “civilized.” Human life is violent, nasty, and explosive.
This is, after all, a horror film. It’s meant to horrify us. And there’s nothing on earth more horrifying than existence itself.
Horror challenges our beliefs that the world can be controlled, and Midsommar knows just how to do it
Note: This should go without saying, but if you don’t want any spoilers at all about the plot of Midsommar, stop here and come back after you’ve seen the film.
Horror burrows under our skin because it clobbers one of the core principles we Modern People cling to: The world may be confusing, but it is ultimately knowable. Through study and medicine and technology, we can control everything from our emotions to the weather.
Of course, this is a ridiculous fiction, but we hold on to it to get through the day. Even religious people, who look beyond the strictly material to make sense of the world, still tend to believe in scientific explanations for why rain falls, or why some combination of ingredients, pressed into a pill, can help you feel better.
So the truly inexplicable unnerves us, and perhaps nothing is more inexplicable than death — why it happens and whether it has meaning or simply proves that nothing really matters in the end. We don’t understand it. We never have.
That’s what Aster seems to inherently understand: His films spend lots of time developing a sense of dread about and horror of the ordinary before they spiral off into the extraordinary. Life and its disintegrations are scary enough.
Hereditary was about a family (and especially a woman) in deep mourning after the ordinary death of one family member and the tragic death of another. In the end, the film dipped into the terrifyingly supernatural.
In Midsommar, another woman, a graduate student named Dani (Florence Pugh), is grieving her entire family after her sister, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, kills herself and her parents by piping car exhaust into the sealed-off house at night. Mental health issues seem to runs in the family — another strong link to Hereditary, which can be read as an allegory for inherited mental illness — but an event like this would take down the most stable and even-keeled person. Dani takes a break from school, but holds it together with the help of her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor). (More on that name later.)
The thing is, Christian was about to break up with Dani just before the tragedy, with encouragement from his fellow dirtbag grad school friends Josh (William Jackson Harper), Mark (Will Poulter), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). But now, of course, he can’t.
Months later, when summer arrives, Dani and Christian are still listlessly together. Josh is writing his dissertation on traditional midsummer celebrations, and Pelle is from a remote village in northern Sweden, so when Josh decides to accompany Pelle home for a month and a half to do more research, Mark and Christian decide to tag along. And after a near-fight with Dani, Christian invites her too — apparently to avoid an actual fight — and to everyone’s surprise, she decides to come.
Pelle’s village is more like a commune, or “a community,” as Pelle puts it — essentially a cluster of four buildings nestled into a hidden valley. To get there, the group drives four hours from Stockholm, hikes through the woods, and finally emerges into the clearing through a wooden gate that resembles a sunburst. Everyone in the community is tall and blond and Swedish, and for their annual “midsommar” celebrations, they’ve dressed in white, braided flower crowns, and prepared for nine days of rituals.
Everything in the community seems at once odd and kind of idyllic. It’s all very harmonious. The quartet of Americans start to learn the ways of the group, who split life into 18-year seasons: spring (until age 18), summer (ages 18 to 36), fall (36 to 54), and winter (54 to 72). Your work, activities, stature in the community, and even sleeping arrangements are dictated by your season. They’ve developed a way of life that, through its rituals, ascribes a sacredness to every part of life, from birth to death — basically, the kind of religion less interested in deities than in worshipping the cycle of life itself.
But the harmony, of course, masks something much darker. And the four American interlopers slowly discover that they’re being drawn into it, which they very much cannot control.
Midsommar suggests existence is terrible, no matter how you handle it
Midsommar brings together some truly excellent acting talent, and that — along with the simultaneously gorgeous and creepy images Aster concocts with cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski — is reason enough to see it. Reynor (whose most winning role is as the older brother in Sing Street), Poulter (from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch), and Harper (playing a version of his Good Place character Chidi) are all great counterweights to the ethereal villagers.
Each ably represents some kind of dully modern tendency. Josh is the pedantic ethnographer who turns the village’s magic into an object for study; Mark won’t stop vaping and making lewd comments about the women; and the conflict-avoiding Christian — whose very name seems chosen to indicate he’s the avatar of a post-pagan era — seems incapable of making choices for himself, or of imagining himself in anyone else’s shoes.
But the most stunning performance comes from Pugh, who ignited 2017’s Lady Macbeth with her chilling portrayal of a wronged woman exacting her revenge on the world of men. (She’ll soon be playing Amy March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, due out this fall.) In Midsommar, she unloads her guts in paroxysms of grief so primal and violent, they nearly upstage the film’s scariest images.
And scary images it has in abundance. After its initial tragedy, Midsommar spends so much time letting us dwell in the sunlit paradise of the village that we’ve almost forgotten we’re watching a horror film by the time the first jolt arrives. When it does, though, the movie won’t let us forget again. There’s no cutting away from the disturbing in Midsommar (in fact, the camera prefers to push into the worst of it); you will look at this, and you will see the violence that is life and death, the movie says.
Yet it’s the clash of the pagan rituals and the outsiders’ attempts to deal with them that’s scariest. Some try to analyze, or to run away; others, in the end, just give up. Yet Midsommar is not really pro-pagan. Is life in a world where death is accepted, welcomed, even ritualized better than in our own, where it is nasty and brutish and unnaturally extended?
Yes, the movie says, but also no. If anything, the perspective of Midsommar is almost anti-humanist: People find ways to make the crude facts of life, the violence of acts of birth, reproduction, and death, seem less awful. But whether we celebrate the seasons of life or fight them, welcome the changes or mourn them, it’s still bad.
There’s no escaping the brutality of existence, no dark corner to hide in. The best you can do is look it straight in the eye and smile through the savagery.
Midsommar opens in theaters on July 3.