How did Ari Aster follow up on the success of Hereditary? By creating the divisive, darkly comic, darkly dark Midsommar.
When I reviewed Ari Aster’s previous horror film, Hereditary, I probably didn’t give him enough credit for the impactful images he was able to create. That’s typically the biggest issue with these marathons, I don’t have time to sit with the movies I watch before spewing out my thoughts on them in a rush to get to the next one. A lot of the impact of horror, and all film really, reveals itself over time. I may enjoy a movie in the moment but forget all about it a week later. With Hereditary, I didn’t anticipate how much I would think about it over the next couple of years, and while my review was generally positive, I would probably rank it higher now that I’ve discovered how much it has stuck with me. Aster’s latest, Midsommar, strikes me as another one that I will still be considering years from now. There are scenes in the film that are indelibly burnt into my psyche. Contributing to that even more is the fact that Aster completely eschews the darkness that is emblematic of horror cinema, presenting the bizarre and revolting in bright daylight and saturated color.
The story involves a group of college students who are invited to the annual Springtime festival of a small village in Sweden, where one of them grew up. At least one of them is interested in the cultural experience in an academic sense, but the main draw seems to be the travel, drugs and beautiful scenery. As you might expect, there is a sinister underbelly to the commune’s hippie-dippie lifestyle, and exactly how orchestrated the students’ participation has been is a subject that could be debated well after the movie ends. There is real confidence in Aster’s work here, both with the previously mentioned lighting choices and with the setup of the overall plot. There is no big mystery here to keep us on our toes. Sure the specifics of what dangers await our protagonists are not necessarily telegraphed, but you know immediately what the general shape of the plot will be. As soon as the trip is booked, so to speak, your assumptions about how things will go down are proven inevitably accurate. You know what type of movie you are watching, and so does Aster, so he doesn’t bother playing coy. Instead, he relies on his depraved imagination to ensure that the horrors are truly horrific – and they are – rather than sewing a bunch of twists and turns into his script to keep you distracted. Rather than focusing on the motivations of the antagonists, he spends time digging into the psyches of the students and letting that inform how they react in unexpected ways.
I don’t want to get into details here, but the ending has seemed to generate some conflicting opinions that are worth exploring. The question seems to be about whether certain characters deserve their fate, and the film does seem to invite us to consider that. All I’ll say is that I think you have to approach the movie on its own terms, and not like it’s a news story. Horror is a genre that is built exclusively on metaphor. At its most basic, it is about people (often individuals, but sometimes society at large, like in a zombie or Kaiju movie) getting punished for a shortcoming or something they have done wrong. Now, that doesn’t track if you are too literal-minded. Nobody deserves to be tortured or dismembered for a basic character flaw, but if you set aside the nature of the punishment, you open yourself up to have a much more fruitful examination of whether the flaw is worthy of punishment at all. That’s where Midsommar is much more nuanced. In some ways, I see it as a dark empowerment fantasy in the vein of The Blackcoat’s Daughter or The Witch. It is overstuffed to some extent, and leaves a lot up to interpretation, but when you watch dozens of horror films each year, you come to appreciate the ones that have ambitions beyond a handful of jump scares and a big twist at the end. It won’t be for everyone, but even if you don’t like it, I guarantee you won’t forget Midsommar any time soon.
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