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‘Midsommar’ Review: The Horror of Bad Relationships and Worse Vacations

Ari Aster’s hyper-aware movie builds a scary mousetrap with Swedish bait, but it has more virtuosity than vision.

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‘Midsommar’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director ari aster narrates a sequence from his film, featuring florence pugh..

“My name is Ari Aster, and I am the writer and director of “Midsommar.” This scene directly succeeds a scene in which our protagonist, Dani, played by Florence Pugh, is pressured into taking mushrooms. She recently suffered a very, very serious loss and is probably not in the best place to take psychotropic drugs.” “Can you feel that, the energy coming up from the earth?” “A big challenge that we took on in this film was putting the spectator into the experience of somebody going through a mushroom trip. This is the first scene that kind of introduces psychedelic elements in the film that will be more prevalent later on.” “Look, the trees too, they’re breathing.” “There’s a lot of sound design work here that’s also helping bring us into her subjectivity. When she looks up at the tree, we notice that the tree now seems to be bending and warping, that the texture seems to be moving. As I was working with the visual-effects artists on these shots, we managed to experiment a lot and find what was too much and what was not enough.” “You guys are like my family.” “I would say that some of these shots we had 80 versions of. And then when she stands up, Dani is thrown instantly into a bad trip.” “I’m going to go for a walk.” “And from here we kind of enter this negative vortex — “ “No, no, no, no. Don’t think that. You’re fine. It’s almost your birthday.” “ — where we start playing with facial warping, warping expressions. This effect was especially difficult to accomplish, and so a big part of my job and the job of my editorial team was actually to be merciless in the way we watched these effects as they came in — “They were laughing at me.” “ — to see if there were any effects in the background that jumped too suddenly or where the effect feels especially digital.” “You want to come meet my friends?” “Thank you, I’m — “ “The tripping effect for the background is more pronounced at the very end of the shot than anywhere else in the film. So the disorientation that the viewer might feel at this moment is more extreme than they will feel again.”

By Manohla Dargis

We horror-movie lovers are cheap dates. A creaking door and a shocking edit can be all it takes for us to yelp in surrender, as our sympathetic nervous systems kick in and we grab our seat arms or each other. Ari Aster, who made a splash last summer with his feature directing debut, “Hereditary,” understands the genre’s fundamentals. But his strength in that movie and his new one, “Midsommar,” is the setup, that part when he lays out his characters, their worlds and the menace that closes on them like a claw.

A cautionary tale about bad relationships and worse vacations, “Midsommar” gets its creep on early. When it opens, Dani (Florence Pugh), its deeply troubled axis, is having a lousy day that rapidly turns devastating . Her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), who’s on the verge of breaking up with her, isn’t much help, though he eventually comes through. Months later Dani is still having a rough time while Christian continues eyeing the closest exit. Their uneasy dynamic intensifies and changes during a catastrophic trip to a small, strange community in Sweden, where the expected summertime fun gives way to terror.

Aster handles the windup shrewdly with a persuasive realism, a deliberate pace and crepuscular lighting. Notably, he also sets Dani’s solitary tears and all of her feelings against the solidarity that Christian shares with his buds. The guys don’t make sense as friends, which scarcely matters at that point. Aster banks on the suspension of disbelief, which is part of the delicate compact we make with horror movies. When one bro, Mark (Will Poulter), starts running down Dani, you can almost see the expiration date on his forehead. As with much in this hyper-aware movie, Mark fits the role he was created to play by motor-mouthing his way into a narratively justified demise.

The stateside stuff drags (the movie runs two hours, 20 minutes) but when the story shifts to Sweden, everything changes, including the light. With his estimable crew — the cinematographer is Pawel Pogorzelski, the production designer is Henrik Svensson — Aster creates a sun-blasted, open-plan settlement that conveys airiness, back-to-the-land self-reliance and other assorted healthy things. There’s something odd about the smattering of buildings, which are too off-kilter to pass as charming; there are too few shadows and corners to hide in. The same goes for all the smiling white people in their pretty folk costumes. They’re so welcoming, yet so vacant.

If this were a Jordan Peele freakout, someone might have a clue. Someone else might be hurriedly packing a bag. But, as Aster established in “Hereditary,” his interest rests largely on building an elaborate mousetrap. From the moment Dani, Christian and the rest pass through the settlement’s sunburst gate, everything from the green hills girdling the compound to the flowing choreography contributes to the slow-growing, inexorable sense of entrapment. By the time a few dozen women are danci ng in circles around a maypole, even the camerawork — with its sinuous flow and contrapuntal push-ins and pullouts — seems to be tightening its grip on the visitors.

It’s fun, at first, partly because something feels distinctly off, like milk that’s just gone bad. (You don’t know how bad until you taste it.) Christian’s Swedish friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) doesn’t offer any clues. So Christian, Mark and their not-brainy enough pal Josh (William Jackson Harper) scope out the scene and the locals. The women are friendly, and numerous. And while their dances look picturesque there’s an undercurrent of intensity and purpose that starts chipping away at the peaceful vibe .

[Read about the new wave of horror movies centered on family dread.]

After a while, an unproductive restlessness sets in as you wait for the characters to matter as much as the silky moves and painstaking details. Horror depends on the spectacle of human frailties, on the good and foolish choices that bridge the distance between the viewer and the screen (or blow it to smithereens). But when characters are as stupid as the visitors in “Midsommar,” it only encourages your sadism, which is presumably the point. Aster clearly worships at the altar of Stanley Kubrick (a hexagonal design here is right out of the Overlook Hotel collection ), and he seems too meticulous to let avoidable mistakes — risible lapses in logic — happen without reason.

Unlike Kubrick or Peele, though, Aster isn’t interested in psychological complexities that can make a character’s terminal fate meaningful and turn directorial virtuosity into vision. Despite all the time he lavishes on Dani and Christian’s relationship, which is drawn along stereotypical gendered lines ( consuming female need that becomes devouring), the couple remains instructively uninteresting. That’s the case despite Pugh. She works hard to make Dani into more than a walking wound, but again and again, the character betrays both her common sense and your faith, all so the women can dance, the men howl and the maypole can hook up with ye old vagina dentata.

Rated R for grisly Viking-style torture and other gruesome spectacles. In English and Swedish, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Midsommar review: One of the year’s strangest, most distressing, and most memorable films

Director ari aster’s follow-up to last year’s hereditary proves he’s far from a one-hit wonder, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Ari Aster. Starring: Florence Pugh, Will Poulter, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Liv Mjones, and Julia Ragnarsson. 18, 147 mins

For director Ari Aster , horror starts at home. It’s those closest to us that can inflict the deepest wounds. In his debut film Hereditary , released last year to both great acclaim and some healthy dissent, he dealt with the terrors of the family unit, where guilt and resentment have as powerful a sway as love. Yet he did so with the help of all things macabre – witches, ghosts, and demons – and crafted tableaux straight out of a waking nightmare. His follow-up, Midsommar , serves up much of the same: it’s a break-up movie wrapped up in pagan horror. It’s also bound to be one of this year’s most memorable films, proving that Aster is far from a one-hit wonder.

At its centre is Dani (Florence Pugh), a young American woman who’s suffered unspeakable loss but isn’t getting the support she needs from her boyfriend of four years, Christian (Jack Reynor). He’s an emotional brick wall, which isn’t helped by the fact his friends have always encouraged him in his neglectfulness, at one point declaring her frequent phone calls to be “literally abuse”. They do, at the very least, offer her a pity invite to their boys’ trip to northern Sweden, where they plan to visit the hometown of Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) and take part in its ancestral midsommar celebration – an event that takes place there every 90 years. Each of the men are drawn there for different reasons: Christian and Josh (William Jackson Harper) are both anthropologists with an interest in the local traditions, while Mark (Will Poulter) is only there for the ladies. Pelle, at first, seems just a little homesick, although he’s suspiciously eager to have Dani tag along.

The people of his isolated community, known as the Harga, seem friendly enough, though a little unusual. Everything they do seems bound by ritual, whether it’s the way they eat, do their laundry, or flirt with their new visitors. Unsurprisingly, this veneer of geniality eventually starts to crack, as their customs become increasingly barbaric with each passing day. The violence is brutal, the deaths are gruesome, and their cruelty is unsurpassed. The orgies are a bit awkward, too. Yet, Midsommar , at the end of the day, isn’t here just to crank scares out of creepy European traditions. It’s about what happens when you drop a fragile relationship into the most extreme of circumstances, in a place where everything is driven by a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Dani and Christian’s reactions to this unfolding horror tell us everything we need to know about them. In a startling performance from Pugh, we see her mouth start to sink into a downturned grimace, as she collapses on to the floor under the weight of her own anguish, wailing like an animal. Reynor, who’s also excellent, reacts to everything like a deer in headlights. His way to cope is to straight out refuse to process anything that’s happening to him. It’s the fundamental differences between two people, supposedly committed to each other, that ends up being the scariest thing of all.

As he did in Hereditary , Aster puts much of his emphasis on singular, shocking images. He lets the camera creep closer and closer until we become consumed by what see before us. Sometimes we’re watching the action unfold in the reflection of a mirror, like we’re watching our own selves. But we’re also constantly tripped up by a false sense of tranquillity. The film, which stretches to nearly two and a half hours, is in absolutely no rush to reach its horrifying conclusion. That might leave some impatiently looking at their watches, wondering when the heads will finally start to roll, but it also allows you to feel at home with the characters’ own uncertainty about the situation. The Harga treat every act – whether horrifying or not – as just an ordinary part of their lives, which makes Christian and his friends initially unwilling to turn tail and run, since they’re so concerned about seeming disrespectful to their welcoming hosts. The sun barely sets during the summer in northern Sweden, meaning the vast majority of scenes take place in bright daylight. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski surrounds us in the superficial comforts of blue skies, fertile greenery, and the crisp white tunics of the Harga. Henrik Svensson’s production design equally avoids the overtly sinister, with the commune’s wooden buildings lovingly hand-painted with simple patterns and scenes of old, folksy practices. It’s only when you look closer that you realise these images are actually a warning of what lies ahead.

None of this sounds like the usual way to approach horror, but Aster’s MO is to throw convention out of the window. Again, much like his previous film (specifically, Toni Collette’s explosive breakdown at the dinner table), there are traces of morbid humour, but these are tense, uncomfortable laughs – the kind that unintentionally burst out when we’re faced with the incomprehensible. When I found myself sniggering at bloody mayhem, I really did feel like a part of this slow descent into madness. Midsommar might seem like an easy sell (people in flower crowns being creepy! Wicker Man vibes!), but it’s far from an easy movie. It’s strange and distressing at times, even a little punishing to audiences, but it’s filled with ideas, images, and feelings that will stay with you long after the credits roll. And it’s worth every second.

Midsommar is released in UK cinemas on 5 July

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Spooky brain-bender Midsommar thrills with creepy Swedish communes and endless sunshine: EW review

You can’t be afraid of the dark in Midsommar , because darkness never comes. Everything that happens in writer-director Ari Aster’s cornea-searing, fantastically unnerving folk-horror reverie unfolds in the dazzling glare of June-bright sunlight — a waking nightmare nestled cozily within the clapboard barns and verdant valleys of the Swedish countryside (though actually, it was shot in Hungary).

Emotionally fragile Dani ( Outlaw King ’s Florence Pugh) is still lost in the fugue of a recent family tragedy when she gloms onto a guys’ trip her increasingly distant boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and several of his friends have planned: two pastoral weeks in the hometown of their fellow grad student, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren).

Though it’s not really a town at all, more a small communal settlement — and its beatific residents, with their Maypoles, muslin gowns, and flower crowns, seem to be toeing some hazy Scandinavian line between weekend at Coachella and Wicker Man . The group’s arcane rituals — the psychedelic teas and hand-carved runes, a lone bear in a cage that nobody offers to explain — seem charmingly quirky at first, and then more sinister.

Aster ( Hereditary ) is more a master stylist and moodsetter than a storyteller; even the plot’s most unsettling turns tend to come telegraphed with portent. Characters, too, lean toward archetype: the callow, self-absorbed boyfriend (Reynor); the earnest academic (William Jackson Harper); the boorish horndog (Will Poulter).

But his actors — especially the luminously expressive Pugh — are too good not to make the most of their roughly sketched roles. And like the fretful violins that stagger raggedly over the soundtrack, the skin-pricking pleasures of Midsommar aren’t rational, they’re instinctive: a thrilling, seasick freefall into the light. A–

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“Midsommar,” Reviewed: Ari Aster’s Backward Horror Story of an American Couple in Sweden

Ari Aster is a writer and director of cult movies—his two features, “ Hereditary ,” from 2018, and “Midsommar,” which opened last week, are both grotesque and gory dramas about cults. “Hereditary” showed a family’s destruction by an ancient curse, which turned a young suburban man into a mystical cult’s unwilling king. “Midsommar” is the story of a group of American graduate students who are invited, or lured, by a Swedish friend to a remote summer festival, which turns out to involve a series of ritual murders. Both films are built backwards—their elaborate setups are designed to generate particular images of horror. Their psychology is flimsy, their characters undeveloped beyond a small set of traits that lead, inevitably, to the films’ results. Aster lines up details that don’t merely invite reconciliation but provide virtually the entire dramatic experience. There’s a political tinge to those details, which presents an illusion of substance and a veneer of social conscience. In “Hereditary,” it’s a literal perpetuation of patriarchy; in “Midsommar,” it’s the fecklessness of a shitty boyfriend. But, in both movies, the imagery that gives them their emotional impact takes precedence over any dramatic considerations. In “Hereditary,” the less-ambitious film, the results are merely ludicrous; in the grander and more visionary “Midsommar,” they’re regressive, the product of a filmmaker who’s so busy looking at his images that he doesn’t see what he’s doing.

“Midsommar” begins with a tragedy. The protagonist, Dani (Florence Pugh), a psychology student, discovers a terrifying e-mail from her sister, Terri (Klaudia Csányi), who is bipolar. Home alone, Dani seeks the consolation of her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), a graduate student in anthropology, who’s hanging out with his male friends. After he grudgingly agrees to see her that night, Dani learns that Terri has killed her parents and herself. Several months later, Christian is preparing to take a trip to Sweden in the company of his fellow anthropology students, the earnest Josh (William Jackson Harper) and the frivolous Mark (Will Poulter), at the invitation of yet another classmate, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). It’s supposed to be a guys’ trip, spiced with the fantasy of Swedish women awaiting them, and Christian has been keeping it a secret until soon before the departure date. Nonetheless, he again grudgingly invites the grieving Dani to come along, and, to his and his friends’ dismay, she accepts.

The exposition, setting up the premise for the trip, is both lugubriously long and trivializingly brief. The entire drama depends upon the relationship between Dani and Christian, but, in lieu of developing it, Aster drops details onscreen like index cards. Dani wonders, on the phone to a friend, whether she has been burdening Christian with her troubles. In a bar, Christian’s friends echo back at him that Dani is depending on him and “doesn’t like sex.” But little of their relationship is actually shown. Aster reduces the film’s central dynamic to something even less thoughtful than stereotype or cliché—he renders it as assumptions, as offscreen events that suffice to be filled in by viewers. He does the same with Terri’s agonies and Dani’s grief; he uses the theme of mental illness and constructs the thin and bare texture of Dani’s life not to consider her experience but to enable his plot. Orphaned and seemingly completely isolated, with no friends or other relatives, Dani is both tethered solely to Christian and vulnerable to the wiles of a surrogate family, however malevolent.

By the time the group gets to Sweden, the movie, only a few minutes old, is virtually over: it’s built on such a void of insight and experience, such a void of character and relationships, that even the first level of the house of narrative cards can’t stand. Not long after they arrive at the isolated grounds of the festival, it becomes clear to them that they’ve been lured into a sort of cult. The residents wear floral white robes and practice traditional arts and crafts, and they welcome their visitors with a cheerful round of hallucinogenic mushrooms. But the rigid order of their society quickly appears coercive and soon turns deadly, with the enforced ritual suicide of two elderly people. As the action proceeds, the film devolves into a sort of pseudo-anthropological version of “And Then There Were None,” as the visitors become, successively, victims of ever more horrific, ritually mandated killings.

The scheme of “Midsommar” revolves around its characters’ field of study, anthropology: the organization of society, the nature of culture. One of the crucial pretexts for the graduate students’ trip to the festival is that Josh is writing his thesis on summer-festival rituals across cultures and hopes to include this one in his research. What’s more, after his first experiences at the festival, Christian, who’s floundering in his field and unsure about his thesis topic, decides to make it his subject of study, as well, creating a rift between the two friends that further isolates both and renders them ever more vulnerable to the cult’s clutches. The trip’s anthropological basis, and the theoretical premise enfolding the elaborately imagined festival, suggests an admirably bold ambition on the part of Aster—a severe test of artistry akin to the grand design of Jordan Peele, who, in his second feature, “ Us ,” embraced a similarly vast view of social order symbolically, and that of Jim Jarmusch in his political zombie movie “ The Dead Don’t Die .”

Yet the world-building of “Midsommar” remains at the level of information-dosing; Aster doesn’t imagine the story in relation to modern experience—there isn’t even the power of Google, with which his characters could put the rustic retreat of horror into context (or wonder at the lack of it). By binding his characters to the needs of the plot, Aster reduces the film’s grand purview to a petty grumble and, in the process, he uses the anthropological framework—likely unintentionally—as the basis for a smug and narrow-minded pathologizing of social science. After the suicides of the elderly people, the only other two visitors, Connie (Ellora Torchia) and Simon (Archie Madekwe), horrified, decide to leave the compound at once, and are, supposedly, being taken to the nearest train station by a member of the group—separately. That separation, obviously suspicious, is justified by one resident on the grounds that the only available truck is a two-seater, and one couldn’t sit on the other’s lap because, he says, “We don’t break traffic laws.”

That’s the best single line reading, the only truly memorable moment of performance, in the entire movie. It’s also the movie’s most meaningful, and grimmest, joke. Rulebound but lawless, living nominally in Sweden but utterly cut off from the supervision and regulation of Swedish law, the cult is the very essence of autonomy, of a freely chosen social organization that’s subject to no other civil authority—and that, at the same time, asserts its own sense of righteousness on the grounds of ancient and transcendent authority. In this sense, the subject of “Midsommar” is the absurdity and obtuseness of suspending moral judgment for other cultures in the name of curiosity, respect, or relativism.

In the course of the film, Dani sees the depths of betrayal to which Christian is willing to descend. (Is he groomed, drugged, desperate to ingratiate himself with his hosts, who are now also his thesis benefactors, merely monstrous, or some combination thereof? The movie doesn’t say; for all the time that the couple spends together, Aster doesn’t pause or detour to hear their thoughts.) Dani ultimately gets a measure of revenge—though even this, in Aster’s archly plotted script construction, offers Dani some mixed motives of her own, a measure of mercy along with her rage. It isn’t only anthropology that comes in for derision; Dani’s studies in psychology, too, are rendered ludicrous as much by the cult’s perverse cruelty as by her own unexplored and vague relationship to all of her experiences.

On the other hand, Aster is big on décor and costume. The architectural idiosyncrasy of the buildings on the vast property; the intricate wallpaper; the elaborate mural that shows, briefly but unambiguously, a woman cutting her own genitals; the floral arrangements and table settings; the sheafs and tarps laid out for hundreds of feet along the breadth and length of a pathway; the meticulous preparation of victims and laying out of corpses; even a few noteworthy special effects that conjure hallucinogenic states with wavery motions—all suggest a greater attention to eye-catching detail than to the lives or thoughts of the characters. Aster is after effects, not causes; doctrines, not ideas. Certain images of mutilated bodies, of violence, of gore, fulfill the basic requirements of the genre—they shock, they stir fear and revulsion, and they add an element of moral horror, the implications of which seem to have eluded Aster’s decorative gaze. Under the rhetoric of pleasure, freedom, and the warmth of a virtual extended family, Aster finds bloody totalitarian mind control. In the name of ethnographic interest, he finds complicity in evil. From the spirit of adventure and curiosity, he finds horror. In the end, the subject of “Midsommar” is as simple as it is regressive: lucky Americans, stay home.