Movie Review: "Midsommar" Is a Festivus for the Stressed of Us

It's the year's most hardcore film, according to Aussie censors.

Midsommar arrives in cinemas 12 months after writer-director Ari Aster’s previous effort, and even the passing of a lunar year feels too soon for anyone to safely re-enter his orbit.

His feature debut Hereditary was a tightly coiled horror film that slowly burrowed into our psyches, leaking paranoiac poison in viewers’ ears telling them that the things in life we should truly fear are physical decay, our fragile sanity, and the false comfort of our family, not necessarily in that order.

It wasn’t scary so much as it was deeply, deeply upsetting and, okay, also a little scary. If you can’t remember whether or not you saw it, that means you definitely didn’t see it. I… recommend it?

Now here comes Midsommar, which lets Aster indulge in his favourite vices: slow-pans on characters with chilling smiles; characters grief-screaming until they gag; unexpected nudity.

Dude has a type.

The question is: Do you share those predilections? Before telling you the premise of Midsommar, I should warn that Aster’s movies aren’t for everyone. In fact, if I didn’t personally enjoy getting sucked into his odd imagination, I don’t know I’d be able to say with authority that his movies are for anyone. (Shout out to the woman in the audience behind me who fell asleep during the first act, woke up at precisely the most horrifying scene, and then fled the cinema. Watching angry walkouts are half the fun.) The best way to know if you’ll be into—or if you’re up for—Midsommar is to watch Hereditary first. And if you somehow still have an appetite, välkommen.

The multitalented (and fearless) Florence Pugh stars here as Dani, a young woman who tags along with her boyfriend and his three mates to a once-in-a-lifetime renewal festival in Sweden. (Her performance is astounding, an equal to the showcase of guttural torment by Toni Collette in Hereditary.) Jack Reynor plays Christian, Dani’s scrub of a boyfriend who has wanted to dump Dani for months, but lost his nerve after she suffered a traumatic loss in her family. He passive-aggressively invites her along to the boys’ trip, and she accepts, apologising constantly for things that aren’t her fault. Christian’s buddy Mark (Will Poulter) is annoyed by her attendance, though other buddies Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) don’t seem to mind as much. Pelle just wants to show off the commune he grew up on, and Josh mainly wants to study them for his thesis. And the commune, well, they have their own hopes and dreams for the Americans, which are grimly and gorily realised as the picture slow-burns its way towards emotional and psychological wildfire.

I won’t give away anything else, because I’m not a monster, unlike perhaps the man who engineered the violent, extremely disturbing methods of dispatch for his characters. It’s intriguing to think that Aster was initially a hired gun brought on board to create a thriller set in Sweden, and managed to bring so many of his idiosyncrasies to this. Even more than Hereditary, Midsommar is profoundly patient and often withholding, yet absolutely unrestrained in its blood, viscera and bodily transmutation at key moments. It helps that Aster has reteamed with his cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, who’s given both a gift and a challenge in the daytime setting (the sun never sets throughout Midsommar’s final acts, increasing viewer eye-strain for additional draining effect, and putting all the horror under a literal solar spotlight). Together, they make dark magic.

Aster calls it a “breakup” flick, and, sure. The slow rot of Dani and Christian’s relationship is certainly sped up by their proximity to this nightmarish festival unfolding before them. I largely saw this as another twisted parable about families, and whom we choose to trust. In Hereditary, a son grew up fearing his mother, and they both lived to see his fears realised. In Midsommar, a daughter loses her family and first seeks comfort in an emotionally-unavailable partner; no wonder she starts to see the appeal of this Swedish commune that’s too emotionally available, even as their intentions are revealed. Aster has found the ultimate back-channel into our primal terrors, making us suspicious of the people we would otherwise run to in a tragedy. And damn if it doesn’t work every time.

4/5

Midsommar arrives in Australian cinemas 8 August. Rated R18+ for high impact injury detail.