REVIEW: Grief, Death and Domesticity in Ari Aster’s Midsommar
By Sarah Jasem
Midsommar (2019) feels like a film written by an alien in 10,000 years time. Landing on a dust covered Earth, secretly thrilled at its emptiness, it found evidence of life through Facebook memorial posts and ancient murals before concocting an ironic fable of civilised primality to tell his alien children. All while on drugs. Parts of the modern life cycle, like relationship issues, loss and bad holidays are cooked into a primitive, surreal fable of bears, flower filled fields, a Swedish midsummer ritual, desire, threat and magic surrealism; all tied inescapably to grief and death.
This is the only way I can explain what Ari Aster’s second feature film feels like, an alien telling a folk horror fairy-tale pulp of a fable to their wide-eyed and confused children.
But of course I would assume aliens have families, because as Ari Aster likes to remind us by fixating upon the family as locus for melodrama and horror, we live and die within or looking for our family. In Hereditary (2017), Aster’s first feature film, the horror of living with family was the central theme. In the latest addition to the fireplace mantlepiece of domestic life horror films, is Midsommar. It’s the central protagonist Dani’s (Florence Pugh) search for a substitute family with which the central unease flourishes.
Midsommar follows the story of Dani (Florence Pugh) who joins her emotionally castrated boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) on what was meant to be an all lads holiday to witness a Midsummer festival held by his friend’s family, the Hårgan people. Set in a sunlit sprawling flower budded field, it manages to be just as claustrophobic as its predecessor Hereditary’s dark, isolated domesticity. Midsommar quickly joins Hereditary and a line of accomplished provocative short films in dealing with family and fear; the fear of death and the need for community; two primitive, long standing evolutionary blips shown by their manipulation into the horror genre.
Midsommar was initially commissioned as a Swedish torture slasher flick, but there is no glimmer of ‘the chase scene’ associated with the subgenre, or gory gratuitously detailed killings of side characters. Rather than a chase, the tourists, notably the protagonist Dani, who is dealing with her own family trauma and a stilting relationship, are mostly calm. The unease comes not from watching other characters try to escape, but watching them stay. Whilst you would think the commune would be the main point of horror in this film, it is actually rather inoffensive. Watching them stay means we have to be there too, but being immersed as a spectator in this film is mildly nauseating, hypnotically interesting and through prolonged and laborious takes of repeated rituals, it can be pretty tiring.
A challenging scene for production was one where Dani, her boyfriend Christian and his friends take mushrooms on their first stop in the commune’s fields, immersing the spectator in the experience of a mushroom trip. Really, the whole film felt as immersive as a mushroom trip, with the hypnotic sound design swooping in to take you into a character’s subjective before dropping you. There is a great line in Hereditary, in the families home as the central family stood together in a titular scene. The air was said to be ‘flexing.’ In the great cultivated field of the commune, the air also flexes and festers like heat rising- because rather than a small domestic family unit, this one spans and warps the open air into an abstract, immersive foreign space. Pugh’s raw performance as Dani steals the show by grappling with which family to fully immerse and give her life to. The importance of that decision and the impact it will have on her entire world and her place in it frames the film, despite the middle being provocatively meaty and riddled with ‘clues.’ Because sometimes, choosing the right family can be the most important decision that you’ll ever make.