Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR (2019)

Also FWIW this new review today goes in further on a trauma/recovery/community angle; we've talked about it plenty here but it's a further summation.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alisonwillmore/midsommar-ari-aster-florence-pugh

FWIW, I thought the guy screaming in agony was my favorite bit! Just underscored that, no, there is no actual magic at work here. Though that doubly underscored that there really is no incentive for this wacky colony to survive. Just ... drugged-out brainwashing and tradition?

But if you're asking, no, I didn't think the cringe comedy was funny or believable, I didn't think the one obnoxious guy and his constant quips was funny (a colony of guys like that vape dude is my idea of horror movie hell), and no, I didn't think the butt pushing or pube in the food was funny. because they've already established this colony as strange and tradition bound and wrapped up in fertility rituals and whatnot, so if the guy was picked basically as a breeding stud, why would I be shocked or even find it amusing that they treated him more or less as an animal? That's no stranger than anything I'd seen already.

So what did happen with the missing book?

"I didn't find the jokes funny, so it wasn't a comedy." got it

The humour wasn't in him being treated like an animal, it's that "I think I ate one of her pubes" "yep, sounds about right" being a hilarious exchange in itself. I mean, arguing about humour is a futile endeavour, but I feel like you're trying to say that the humour is absent, rather than that you personally didn't find it funny - the former is just wrong, the second is, y'know, absolutely fine.

Obnoxious guy *was* hellish, which is why it was hilarious and the best fun that he got murdered.

xp

I think the implication is that it wasn’t actually missing but as josh had just been killed after being caught with it, they announced its theft as a misdirection/plausible reason why josh & the other guy went missing

Oh yeah, I thought that was super obvious, too?

Considering how little anyone seemed to care about the disappearing guests ...

Oh, and didn't find the Austin Powers joke funny, either, just thought it a banality, like the kind of outdated bestsellers and movies you find sitting in vacation homes or whatever. But hey, if that's your standard for comedy, life's gotta be pretty funny!

I liked that Buzzfeed article. Don't agree with much of it, but it makes some good points and observations.

Anyway, I'll step away for once. Clearly some of you love this film far more than I dislike it, so more power to you.

Oh, and didn't find the Austin Powers joke funny, either, just thought it a banality, like the kind of outdated bestsellers and movies you find sitting in vacation homes or whatever.

Well, yes, it is this, except that this vacation home is a weird cult in Sweden that's going to kill everyone you're there with. Banality + extreme weirdness = unexpected combination = comedy, ba-boom!

Vape guy’s lines were like half actual funny (if still awful) gags and half just witless xenophobia - and there’s so much of it, it’s really wearing. It was kinda cruel to deny the audience an onscreen death for that guy

Just read the Buzzfeed article, and I think it's the closest to how I felt about the film that I've read so far.

Btw to clear up an earlier point of confusion, the may queens are a yearly midsommar thing and not only a part of the 90 year festival - the guy (pelle?) showed dani a picture of “last year’s May queen” in the apartment

I also think he lied to her about losing his family now that I think about it. The trauma/“what else do I have to lose” feeling Dani has that leads her to the communal experience was the best through-line of the film for me. What Emil.y said about hiding in the latrine/screaming it out w the community is the key to understanding why she went there. If you remove that/rewrite the movie to minimize her loss there’s not much left. Her loss and total aloneness in the world is another character in the movie imo.

AND being able to snag a few lols while she’s going through a patently horrific time in her life is basically the only way one can survive.

Lols that are definitively NOT at her expense

Sorry to pop in again, but does it matter that as she is apparently acclimating to the cult she is also constantly being plied with who knows what kind of drugs? That whole May Queen sequence, she is tripping balls and seeing things. So is Christian. Kind of runs counter to any narrative about power and agency when you are constantly getting roofied.

Another question. If she did not win the May Queen celebration, would they have killed her as well?

She doesn’t care about the drugs afaict

She knows and is like whatever sure gimme the tea.

Yeah "roofied" implies being drugged without your knowledge, which I don't believe she ever is.

I was under the impression that Christian was given some sort of strong, disorienting aphrodisiac. He might have taken it willingly, but he didn't know what it would do. Likewise the tea, who knows what that shit was or why she was given it, but to say she (or he) was in control of her faculties I don't think is accurate, even if she or he willingly gave themselves in to it. I dunno, I find that a problematic thematic snag. Are there any times on the commune they are *not* drugged? Who knows.

I didn’t say she was in control of her faculties — I said she didn’t care. I feel like you don’t grasp her mental state very well.

Did any of them care?

The scholarly guy definitely did.

About what drugs they were taking or being given? Don't recall that.

No he cared about his scholarly pursuits. I thought he was trying to be polite wrt their customs and take in all they offered, mushrooms and psychotropic tea and all. To his chagrin!

Was I right that he seemed to know about the cliff sacrifice the night before? When the guy said the name, he gave a glimmer of recognition and refused to tell the others. So he knew what was coming?

I wasn't sure if it was the sacrifice he knew about or another part of the festivities. I imagine that it was probably a different bit (or he was faking knowledge to get one over on his fellow anthropologists?), because even though all those dudes are shitheads it would still be a bit of a stretch to think that he'd be cool with it and not warn anyone. Really not sure about this, though!

Re: the drugs - it's made clear in the first ten minutes of the film that these are grad students who regularly get high. Even when Dani doesn't want to take the mushrooms at first it's pretty obvious that that's because she's not in a good headspace and wants to orient herself, not because she's shocked at the idea. However, the more interesting thing to me about the 'consent' to taking drugs/participating in the rituals is that her initial reluctance is mirrored by Christian nearer the end trying to turn the mushroom tea down and then begrudgingly going along with it anyway. As she grows stronger, he gets weaker, as she becomes more accepted by and accepting of the community, he becomes less desirous of the things he wanted from them (the sex, the drugs, even the knowledge). She's overtaken him and they both know it.

Hmm, that's interesting (even though we never know if they're ever *not* on drugs). Unfortunately, I just don't find their relationship that interesting, but hey.

Just saw this, and I havent read this thread at all so maybe these rambly thoughts have been expressed already, but just felt completely empty, rote & procedural. I guess much respect if it worked for you I thought it was total off-the-rails mess.

Like as soon as the Mysteriously Wholesome Foreign Friend says that they're all invited to his Mysterious Home Village for "ceremonies and rituals" 15 minutes into the movie we all know what the entire structure & plot beats are going to be. And making us sit through 2.25hrs of ominous foreshadowing for the big reveal to be that she chooses to kill the mean boyfriend and join the cult just left me with a big "that's IT?"

Part of the problem might be on my end, since all the foreshadowing seemed so obvious and right out of Genre Horror 101 that I kept assuming the film was one step ahead of me and that eventually there would be some turn or twist that played on the fact that everything was so rote and obvious, but no, it just turns out that they're a weird random-ass murder cult that murders people for no real good reason beyond the fact that they have screentime to fill. (And tbf I'm not exactly looking for plot realism in a film like this, but everything about the cult & its backstory felt like such a horror movie nonsequitir that it was hard for me to take any of it seriously.) The psychology & character arcs were similarly so telegraphed & breadcrumbed that the final shot just felt totally superficial to me. If ppl found it satisfying fair enough, I just feel like if that's all we were leading up to, we could have gotten there at least 35-40 minutes sooner.

Also I liked Hereditary and had no problem with the gore in it, but I felt the gore in this - thinking specifically of the 8?10? closeups of smashed faces - just felt totally childish and juvenile to me. The whole thing just seems like if Green Inferno went to grad school.

Really hated stuff like the scene when the Swedish guy announces the next days ceremony (which ends up being the cliff jumping sacrifice), and the scholarly guy recognizes the name and is reacting with facial expressions like "oh shit, wow thats crazy", and Dani out of nowhere asks "is it scary?" I thought that line was totally totally unmotivated - it was after the first day, which was joyful hanging out and drug taking, an admittedly Dani had a bad trip but she'd have no reason at that point to expect anything scary would happen. It seemed so clumsy and obviously intended to telegraph "THE RITUAL WILL BE A VIOLENT GORY SACRIFICE" that when (after 15 minutesof tedious ceremony scenes) the ritual was revealed to be a violent gory sacrifice after 15 minutes of tedious ceremony, I was just very confused about what this movie was doing and what it expected from me.

Also last gripe but fuuuuck the way they used that disfigured/disabled character, leave that shit back in 70s sleaze-horror, its 2019 dude.

lots of reference to this community as a "cult" itt and not sure that's the appropriate term...more like a religious sect if that's not too fine a distinction

iirc a "cult" is generally understood to center around a charismatic leader/founder

replace "random-ass murder cult" with "random-ass murder religious sect" in my post above

Man some of y'all have some strange approaches to watching movies

Is it scary was one of the lines that made me laugh

Man some of y'all have some strange approaches to watching movies

Another question I asked a bit ago that I'm still wondering about: were any of the Americans (and Brits) ever going to get out of there alive? Had they not wandered off, or gotten nosy, or peed on a tree, or asked to leave, or whatever, were they going to be sacrificed anyway? If Dani was not crowned May Queen, would she have been killed, too?

Does it matter, though?

I def laughed at 'is it scary' but not convinced the humor was intentional

xpost I dunno, there's been a lot of discussion here about power and Dani reclaiming power or whatever, but ... she's a victim here, of several types of abuse. She's drugged, her friends are murdered, she's forced to watch horrific suicides and hammer beatings (how's that for catharsis), she's pressured to participate in pagan rituals while under the influence, and she (and certainly they) was marked to be killed, anyway. One could argue about her agency and state of mind and I appreciate the defenses of this film, but I also see people wanting it both ways. Movie (and she) would be stronger if she was making clear choices and not being pressured/coerced. Like, did it matter that she chose her boyfriend at the end and not Olaf or whoever? What were they going to do, not kill her boyfriend or leave him paralyzed? Let them both go? No one was getting out of there alive.

A lot of the readings about Dani's agency/empowerment clash w/the fact that most of her characters (& everyone else's) choices are completely unmotivated and based on Final Girl/horror movie logic. Having to service the narrative mechanics of a horror movie where the characters get killed off one by one really destroys the coherence of any of the themes imo.

Reading through this thread, the Letterboxd review flappy quotes upthread is all kinds of otm. Aster strikes me as a super gifted & talented director, but with no awareness that he has no ideas as a writer. I would be interested to see him make a film that doesn't feature a graphic closeup of an exploded face, but not sure he has the confidence. Now hes made one movie about a spooky haunted house and one movie about an killer cult -- my bet is that his next movie will be about someone that gets bit by something and turns into a wolfman or w/e.

15 minutesof tedious ceremony scenes

Yeah, see, if you find the protracted scenes like this tedious, then... the film isn't for you! You're marking the film only on whether the "beats" are new enough for you, rather than looking at what those beats are allowing the film to deliver in meaning and visuals. The rituals were beautiful, and the slowness and stillness was the point.

Like, did it matter that she chose her boyfriend at the end and not Olaf or whoever? What were they going to do, not kill her boyfriend or leave him paralyzed? Let them both go? No one was getting out of there alive.

Maybe this matters more if you weren't watching the film with an internal chant of KILL YR BOYFRIEND, KILL YR BOYFRIEND from about two minutes in. Mmmm, it's deliciously satisfying.

Dani isn't a Final Girl, by the way. Final Girls are always at risk of being killed.

Yeah I've been chafing at that description. Final Girls are a trope specific to slasher and slasher-adjacent movies.

I think the gripe about the incest oracle/disfigured person is valid. That was indeed somewhat cheap, esp since they never explained more about it at all. Cut that out and you still have a good movie imo. Emil.y otm AGAIN and doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

The rituals were beautiful, and the slowness and stillness was the point.

So OTM - these sequences reminded me of the kind of 'processional cinema' seen in Jancsó's Red Psalm.

Or as Louis Malle once said, “What we see as spectacle is in fact a ceremony”.

I think the gripe about the incest oracle/disfigured person is valid.

Oh, yes, I haven't addressed this here - honestly, I ended up just relieved that they didn't use him much, as the trailer had made me worried about constant ableism throughout, but I do wish that they'd cut it completely.

If Dani was not crowned May Queen, would she have been killed, too?

I took the "would you like to be Swedish" conversation during the maypole dance as an indicator that at least some members of the commune wanted Dani to join them.

Eh, she's totally at risk of being killed! If she didn't get May Queen? Even after getting May Queen? Not that any of that matters. We can project all sorts of stuff, but there's no clear indication at all what the MO of the colony is. Probably better that way? Though I'm surprised we didn't get a shot of the meat and grain and egg planted suddenly sprouting into a magical drug tree, unless I missed it.

Also, I love the slow rituals! Some of my favorite stuff. And the production design, costumes, etc. That's why I said I thought the film was vapid and full of shit. It's expertly made, I just don't think it has anything to say. And honestly, if this 2 1/2 hour slow pagan murder epic boils down thematically to "KILL YOUR BOYFRIEND" then I think it's an even bigger failure. It's not like he peed on a tree or anything.