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(4 / 5)

Reading reviews for Ari Aster’s two feature films, Hereditary (2018), and this year’s Midsommar, I’ve noticed a trend. Everyone (even his detractors) seems to agree: his movies are hard to shake. Like Hereditary’s King Paimon, Aster’s films enfeeble you, then take possession of you until they decide to leave, requiring more than chonky-cat memes to exorcise.

Having seen both movies, I’m tempted to count myself among the possessed. I definitely haven’t shaken Midsommar just yet, and there are moments from Hereditary I’m not sure I ever will. But I’m not convinced that this accurately describes my, or any of the other critics’, experiences. The more I think about why these movies work, the more I think it’s not the films possessing us; it’s we who possess them, we who always have, and Aster, like some perverse medium, is just putting us in touch with a shared nightmare, able, through his talents, to articulate the unspeakable.

Maybe that’s presumptuous of me. Maybe I’m projecting. And if so, I don’t know if I can write a fair critique of Midsommar. Maybe the truth is that Aster is just a man after my own anxiety-ridden heart, and that I am, therefore, too close to the material to look at it objectively. But what if I’m wrong, and these are feelings we all share to some degree…What if these nightmare images do undergird our reality…In that case, Aster deserves credit. These are oddly specific but evocative fears—the fear of surviving a great fall; the fear of turgid, yellowing skin stuffed with twigs—and all the scarier if, as seems to be the emerging consensus, we share them. It’s one thing to put a man with (insert edged or pointed weapon) on screen in hopes of scaring an audience. The box office attests to that formula all the time. But I think Aster is digging deeper.

Not that Midsommar is particularly deep. Not narratively, anyway. The plot—following a group of graduate students who, at the behest of their friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), accompany him to a pagan festival at his childhood commune in Sweden—lacks drive, at times feeling more like a random assemblage of images and set pieces than a cause-and-effect story. Ari Aster seems more interested in filming a kind of lurid tryptic than a narrative.

But it’s not a huge detriment to the film. Think of it as nightmare logic. And maybe I’m being over-charitable, but I think it fits in with the movie’s overall sense of delirium—a blurring of reality and fantasy made all the blurrier by sacramental psilocybin and the never-setting solstice sun. As with any nightmare, what matters isn’t so much the story; it’s the impression it leaves you with.

And like the most haunting nightmares, Midsommar isn’t downright scary; it’s just very unsettling. Sometimes, as at the end (I had a similar reaction at the end of Hereditary), I was laughing as hard as I was cringing, my mouth codfish-like at the sheer pageantic audacity of it, my brain chanting, He’s really doing this, he’s really doing this. There’s a kind of feel-bad catharsis that comes with the unflinching, lavishly bedecked presentation of things we shouldn’t be seeing. But that presentation, while beautiful to look at, makes these things all the more creepy.

I think what Aster is trying to do is to say that these things aren’t external boogie men hiding in the dark; they’re internal. When Dani (Florence Pugh) has a shroom-induced panic attack, it’s herself she tries to run away from. The anxiety—though it feels like a presence, creeping up on her, following her into the woods—is all in her mind.

Later, when heads smash, whether against rocks or mallets, Aster pulls in tight as if to say, this is the human head subject to blunt trauma; this is the human body, the mortal engine which must one day break down, the vehicle by which you’ll be carried to inevitable, inglorious ends.

The horror is already in us. Our surroundings don’t matter. In the verdant fields, in the comical vape smoke, to the tune of silly flute music, it finds you. It’s something I noticed in Hereditary: Aster’s ability to infect hope with hopelessness. To give us light and then take it away. But in Midsommar, set in the perpetual daytime of the Swedish solstice, he leaves the lights on, suggesting that, even in the light, death comes, sometimes wreathed in flowers.

Midsommar should hit Amazon Prime Video just in time for Halloween, 2019.