Midsommar (2019)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Midsommar (2019) – A. Aster

Director Ari Aster garnered a lot of attention for his first film, Hereditary (2018), that featured Toni Collette as a woman seeking support in dealing with grief over the death of her mother.  This results in a significant amount of family conflict (and horror) and things get very weird.  Midsommar follows a similar pattern.  Florence Pugh (so great in Lady MacBeth, 2016) plays Dani, a young woman who has also recently lost her parents and now travels with her rather thoughtless boyfriend to a remote Swedish village with his friends.  Apart from Dani (a psychology student), they are all postgraduate students studying anthropology.  The trip to Sweden is an opportunity to attend a unique festival at the request of a student from that village but, for Dani, it is also a means of escape from her grief and perhaps a chance to solidify her (shaky) bond with Christian (Jack Reynor).  Arriving in Sweden, the group is repeatedly given magic mushrooms and exposed to the customs and cultural traditions of the Hårga people. The build up of tension is slow and steady, as weirdness is suddenly introduced and then backed away from.  There is a fair bit of foreshadowing (particularly if you look at the paintings and murals around the village in detail) which “explains” the plot but might be too overt.  Because the film takes its cues from The Wicker Man (1973), if you’ve seen that, then you probably have half an idea where this is going (although it gets a lot more graphic). Although Pugh is excellent (despite a role that calls mostly for grimacing and crying), Jack Reynor and the other actors playing the guests are not always convincing. It is probably Aster’s script that lets them down, as he seems more interested in the various rites and pageantry than in his characters – until the end when he wants to comment on the relationship dynamics again (but may not have “earned” the moment?).  Still, this is a film that holds your attention the whole way through, even if your acceptance of its reality wavers at times.  In this genre, that is often the best that we can get.