Let us speak of the story of Dani and Christian. Dani (Florence Pugh, flawless and put through it) has been carrying a great deal of emotional weight around in the form of her sister, who suffers from bipolar disorder and has been having issues with acting out on the internet. Dani is insecure and in need of stability in any form in her life, which is part of why Christian (Jack Reynor, cubby and walking a very fine emotional line) is such a load-bearing part of things. He’s not inattentive, and he’s not disrespectful, but he’s also not really present. Dani Ardor is a woman whose conscientiousness gets weaponized against her by friends, lovers and even total strangers. And Christian Hughes is a serviceable fellow who mistakes habit for kindness.
Their relationship is its own kind of conspiracy — two people who should really know better building a life around letting things slide and yielding to inertia. Their respective friends might as well be aerialists and acrobats for all the leaps, dodges and deflections they indulge in to keep from being the straw that finally fractures four years of habit. But then something unspeakable happens before we even get to Midsommar’s opening credits, and all bets are off. Now that relationship has become a lifeline, and its tendrils have bound the two (and their friends) together. It’s going to take something major to get past that. Enter the Hårga.
A hippie-ish collective far north of Stockholm, the Hårga are Pelle’s people, and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) has proven to be a distraction for Dani, Christian and their friends. The Hårga have a nine-day feast to celebrate the summer, and if the idea of going to a remote commune that no one else has ever heard of for a very special celebration strikes the viewer as odd, even risky, then it’s safe to assume that the viewer has a healthily suspicious nature (or has seen several films that pertain to such an activity). But whether because of academic desire, regular desire, aimlessness or habit, this group of friends is going to Sweden to see what they can see, because not to do so would tear everything apart.
Pelle — the link between our American quartet and the people of the Hårga — is a gorgeous artist, in that he is beautiful, but also quite gifted in drawing beautiful things. He sketches Dani, and he does so like the veritable white-winged dove. It is a birthday gift — a kindness for her — and when someone draws you like a Stevie Nicks picture sleeve, that’s a sign. The fact that he remembers her birthday and Christian doesn’t? Well, also a sign. Never underestimate the significance of art — this is a film wherein textiles and tapestries and secret tomes tell us the truth even as people of all affiliations shakily lie.
The wide-open spaces of the commune are tranquil, and brightly lit. Everything feels so earthy and organic, so when the ’shrooms come out, it’s not seen as that much of a thing. The commune has a very friendly relationship with tinctures and mystery punches, and before long psilocybin and Ativan and Psychedelic Teenage Saffron Tea all mix together to make the very fabric of the world smear and shake. Midsommar’s visual-effects work is sublime, the natural patterns of grass and trees and wind pulsing and coalescing with reptilian-brain unease — it’s like staring into an unfamiliar sea as it slowly rises and creeps closer, closer.
The sounds call to us; pealing chimes, the leafy crunch of hurried steps, the aspirant breathing of the Hårga liturgy, woodwinds of countless variety, and then those distant screams. Midsommar is a film that delights in sensual overload, and it yearns to drown your certainties in sensorial gluttony. If you dig a film that exults in deeply personal passions spilling over into public spaces, you are so ready for this. As soon as we (and the characters) are on solid ground, we are in a heightened, dreamlike environment, with viscerally effective scene transitions that elide time and space as needed with masterful skill, and the way mirrors and reflections are used helps illustrate the push and pull between the interior and the exterior. Likewise, the Hårga have a very tactile approach to emotions, and if our initial impression of them is hippie-derived stoicism, we later see how grand expressions of feeling swell through the crowds like an epidemic. The big emotions are transitive experiences, crafting resonance chambers among the people and amplifying that inciting feeling until it is harnessed, managed and processed. It’s a remarkable touch in a film that digs deeply into many different kinds of behavior.
This also happens to be a deeply funny movie, which may seem at odds with its deliberate tone — blending somber ancient mysteries with the textural equivalent of a fart in church. As viewers, we attune ourselves to the films we watch to sustain balance. And like writer-director Ari Aster’s previous film Hereditary, Midsommar delights in the periodic flash of a concealed hand, and what we thought was solid and stable is neither. People who feel burned by Hereditary can expect a similar hand shaping their journey into the legacy of trauma, though this one doesn’t require a second viewing for its last 20 minutes to work with the rest of the film (though that second viewing helped cement Hereditary as a stone masterpiece).
There are going to be heaps of think pieces about this movie, and what it says about despair, and what people think it’s saying about what suicide means. I welcome them all. Also, much of the advance word on this film danced around some of its thematic similarities to the 1973 classic The Wicker Man — but you could say that about any film dealing with secret religious societies operating under ancient and obscure prerogatives. (It’s part of the subgenre.) The ’70s masterpiece that sticks in my mind and helps process and dissect this exquisite sprawl of a film is Don’t Look Now.
And like that film, Midsommar is a fine surgical probe coupled with a giant face-size mallet. Catharsis, by nature, gives human suffering a purpose.
