Midsommar (2019) 🌺🐻☀️

“Do you feel held by him?”

Ari Aster followed up to his smash horror hit Hereditary with Midsommar, a kind of unintentional inversion of his first movie. Where Heredity is dark, heavy & sinister, Midsommar takes place in sunlight, beauty & celebration. Actress Florence Pugh delivers one of the best performances of 2019 as the grief stricken co-dependant Dani who accompanies her lackluster boyfriend & his buddies on a research trip to Sweden. I think Nerdist’s Lindsey Romain describes the experience of watching Midsommar best: “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so gutted and seen by a movie. I felt sick, I felt joy — I felt so much”.

Bobby Krlic’s score is epic & romantic, often creating an intense dissonance between the uplifting emotions of the music & the horrors of the film’s events. This movie sticks in my bones because ultimately, the film does not tell you whether anything on screen is good or bad. You have Dani’s emotional journey, which is deeply warped, & you have your own moral compass, but the score, editing & cinematography all behave as if the traditions depicted on-screen are perfectly normal. Of course, that’s typical for a white supremasist cults; they can normalize their ideology all day long w/ poetry & traditions, but ultimately they’re only interested in the “purity” of their bloodline. The final moments of this film created so much dissonance within me. Dani ultimately is able to express her emotions, but at such a high cost, I feel like she’s more lost now than ever before.

Midsommar’s emotional structure is what sets this movie apart from other folk horror classics. The very first frames tell you exactly what will happen by the movie’s end, and yet the journey is still surprising because the cult is just the set dressing for a story about grief, pain & loss. In an interview with the LA Times, Aster explained: “Anybody watching the trailer… you probably know where it’s going, right? These people are going to be sacrificed… It was about getting to that inevitable ending in a way that feels emotionally surprising. And my way in was by kind of working through my breakup.”
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#ariaster #florencepugh #willpoulter