Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR (2019)

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.

The Bunuel I always seem to come back to is The Exterminating Angel, which bears (pun intended?) some broad similarities to this film.

Some people desperately need to see the message of "burn your bad boyfriend in a fire" represented exquisitely on screen. Sounds like you don't, that's cool.

The ceremonial stuff was indeed beautifully staged, but just made me wish I was watching something like Color of Pomegranates or something similar that didnt feel the need to spice it up by interspersing graphic kills. I would honestly be way into this movie if the horror & murder elements were excised and it was just about some ppl experiencing their friend's weird religious commune & dealing with their different baggage. Horror plot mechanics seem to be a weird millstone around this guy's neck that he cant shake.

I do have more and more of a problem with bludgeoned, bloody faces framed in exquisite close-ups.

not just burn him but watch him squirm through a sex ritual surrounded by naked crones and then burn him

i didn't think about horror tropes like the final girl at all while watching this movie. it did not seem relevant.

also idk what the beef is with the smashed faces/closeups. it's a horror movie. there will be blood.

Final Girl stuff def. not relevant except in the context of horror tropes, which, yeah, with this guy, maybe that's the problem? After I saw Hereditary I read some interviews, and he claims not not have much of an affinity for horror, and mostly gravitated toward "Hereditary" because he thought/knew genre was more likely to get funding, and he promised/threatened that after "Midsommer" he would veer from horror. We'll see. I did read a Matt Singer review of this that resonated with me. His conclusion:

You can see Aster continuing many of the themes he began exploring in his superior debut, Hereditary; another movie about unbreakable family ties, mental illness, and the way people sometimes can’t help but hurt the people they love the most. In that case, though, Aster did a better job of blending the domestic and the supernatural. In Midsommar, the film gradually shifts from these very precise, very specific insights into toxic relationships into very generic scares at a crazy Swedish summer camp, and the fact that Dani is grieving really doesn’t matter all that much by the time the Swedes get really nutty.

There’s some very gruesome imagery in those climactic sequences, but nothing that will linger with me like the uncomfortable conversation between Dani and Christian in her apartment where he tries to apologize for something, and then she says he’s not really apologizing, and then he tries to explain what he’s saying, and she says she doesn’t even need an apology in the first place. Communication this stilted and tense is the stuff of true horror.

Don't mind them in Get Out or The Evil Dead, I mind them here.

xpost

Has this been posted yet?

https://youtu.be/MNz9nkQYag4

Yeah I mean this wasn't Cabin In The Woods but it seems like a huuuge & strange reach to argue that Dani's character arc is not in dialogue with the idea of the Final Girl.

Re:the smashed faces, the first time it happened me and my friend both laughed like "I cant believe he's doing this again!" Then after the 6th, 7th, and 8th time of cutting back to the same smashed face our mood became more like "Is this guy ok, is this some kind of a cry for help?"

His next movie is going to be nothing but smashed faces and naked people chanting.

I mean this was way less violent / less terror-driven than Hereditary so I'm half expecting his next to contain no horror elements at all

And that's just how he'll get you, the sneak!

I heard a rumor he was offered a ton of money to remake "Face/Off."

Anyway, you all are missing the point. These are movies about mental trauma. Mental trauma! HEAD trauma! In this one he literally beats it into the ground.

/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 that maybe there’s a little too much pressure on Aster to be meaningful this early in his career? Reading interviews about his student movie, he seemed to deliberately be angling himself toward to problematic, for no purpose but to be shocking— perhaps the essence of horror. Not so much apolitical but unpolitical, decisions deliberately made to annoy and discomfort on all levels. Still haven’t seen this yet, though I rewatched Hereditary again after a director was liberally using the score as temp— the final cue over the Hail Paimon sequence is some excellent film music, very cool decisions

Y'all really want to get into it, I don't even think he was a particularly bad boyfriend, any worse than she was as a girlfriend.

Very shocking from the “I was looking forward to seeing this so I could explain it to my wife” guy

Huh?

I said I saw his last movie, and even though I know she doesn't like that kind of movie, I thought she'd like to hear about it. my point with that comment was there's a lot less to describe about this movie than that movie.

Just fancied a cheap shot, nm - he was a bad boyfriend tho

Hah.

I don't know. I wouldn't date the dude myself, but then again, that's something I brought up before: why are they even a couple? The implication of the movie is that they've been together for years at the start of the film, and for years he's been helping her with her sister's breakdowns, and her own breakdowns, and he's starting to find it wearing. And yet - he stays with her. He takes her calls. He leaves his friends (who all want him to break-up with her). He lets her invite herself to his dudes getaway. When she says she doesn't want to take mushrooms, he, admittedly disappointed, agrees to wait with her as well ... until she relents under pressure from vape dude. Boyfriend is not happy, but she's not happy, either. Like, what is he getting out of the relationship? He sticks with her out of sympathy, which is not a healthy reason to be in a relationship but does not necessarily make him a particularly bad boyfriend, worthy of death, just the wrong boyfriend.

Btw, speaking of shock and (lack of) meaning, I did see a profile from last year that compared Aster to ... Todd Solodz.

Hard not to think of Solondz when you watch his first short