Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR (2019)

Ritual human sacrifice: it happens! :)

fwiw I'm not puritanical about drugs at all. It's that in this film they are not taking drugs to have fun, they are being given drugs of unclear properties for a purpose. And given the context of the film, it didn't make me comfortable that people were praising, more or less, her power-move or decision making when she is clearly under duress and under the influence (many influences, actually). In my experience that's not totally different from someone taking drugs then deciding to, I don't know, jump into a quarry and getting hurt. Yes, they took the drugs on purpose, but no, that was not necessarily a clear-headed decision. I so like the idea of this movie as cathartic semi fantasy, of her giving in to the lack of agency. I just feel, yeah, a little uncomfortable, too, because in real life it's kind of uncool to take advantage of people who are not in a good state of mind. But, as established, this isn't real, and as fantasy, in her case, the wrong state of mind might have been the right state of mind!

It kind of goes back to Rosemary's Baby. The whole movie she is being terrified, by both the real world and her imagination (and Satanists). But at the end, when she is holding little baby Lord of Evil, she still smiles and rocks it. Not fair how she got to that point (drugged and raped by the devil and all), but hey, she's there holding her devil kid and she's choosing to like it.

I must say at least bast on his AMA responses that Aster comes off pretty earnest and unpretentious

Yeah! Maybe he'll go (for better or for worse) the David Gordon Green route. Another gifted filmmaker who veers from dramas to stoner comedies. It took DGG about four films and eight years before he got silly.

i think josh actually loves this movie and hasn't yet accepted his coerced catharsis

Tbf, I did not say I hated it, loved the filmmaking and said I wouldn't discourage someone from seeing it. That's pretty good! I mean, love it or not, it's a pretty striking movie. I just found aspects of it problematic, both thematically and narratively. However, like I also said, seeing the stuff distilled in such a way from the Film Comment interview helped me come to terms with at least some of the elements I had problems with.

Ending of Rosemary's Baby is a great analogue for the ending of this. Like, its nice that you've decided to embrace and be happy w/this situation, but it's hard to imagine how this will end up going well down the line.

It's interesting all the very different readings ppl have on the 2nd half of this movie. My feeling re:the screaming-together scene at the end was v much not cathartic, but v tragic & disturbing because yes, these girls are helping her scream out her trauma, but also the trauma itself was caused by them murdering all her friends & having it finally truly sinking in w/her that leaving there alive is never going to be an option & this is just her life now. Very much the way abusive indoctrination/manipulation works, create a problem or trauma & then convince your victim that you are the only solution/safe harbor from that trauma.

idk the screaming scene happens right after she witnesses her boyfriend in the middle of the sex ritual, i think it’s more than “she has trauma bc they murdered all her friends and she’s not getting out of there alive.” total abandonment and grief being met and echoed by a community: it’s cathartic

of course it’s also manipulative but it can be all these things at once

I don’t know that they created her trauma - they didn’t kill her family. Diegetically tho yeah, they are using her pre-existing trauma to manipulate her which is what cults do

xp yeah also otm, she’s not screaming cause anyone died, she’s screaming cause of the infidelity. That’s another thing the community “did” but he was always that guy, explicitly

My first reaction was that the screaming reminded me of Silence of the Lambs, when Catherine Martin screams and Buffalo Bill sort of leans in and mimics/mocks her, not necessarily with menace on his mind but as a kind of twisted mirror.

They didnt create the trauma of her family dying obviously, but they murdered everyone she was with, made her watch other murders, and were basically holding her there against her will. (Even though she eventually becomes OK with her situation there doesnt mean that she ever had the option to leave alive.)

I def didnt read her screaming as simply being a reaction to his infidelity. He sucked and their relationship sucked but I feel like if I was her in that situation and looked through the keyhole and saw my partner in the middle of the horrifying nightmare image of that pagan sex ritual, my reaction wouldnt be wouldnt be "omg i cant believe my partner is cheating on me!" I took it as more the final straw of realizing "reality is fucked and i am trapped in a nightmare".

Its definitely multilayered, which is why I think it was prob my fave & most effective moment in the film. She herself is obv having a cathartic moment but I couldnt get past the objective context of "we are here for to help you through this situation (that we created, and also if you dont accept our help its understood that you will probably get skinned alive or fed to a bear or something, so we encourage you to find a way to make your peace with this and just roll along with it)". It struck me as deeply sad, the final moment when the accretion of all these traumatic & mindfucking experiences finally kills her soul & the old Dani is gone forever. Would have been a great moment to end on actually imo.

I guess she didnt officially know that her other companions were dead, but I'm sure by that point she knew on some level that vape guy was not gonna pop out from around a corner enjoying a nice afternoon vape

lol I like the idea of her having no problem with the pagan sex cult ritual itself, just that it's her jerk boyfriend.

I thought there were echos of Texas Chainsaw Massacre in the screaming as well, where she is just in hysterics, screaming at the horror of it all. There are other references to Chainsaw, too.

It’s her boyfriend having sex with the very young girl she’s been watching him stare at for the whole movie. Again if you are super tied to the literal and diegetic the sex ritual is unusual and disturbing but I think the effect is to emphasise the former aspect

I think “get(ting) past the objective context” is kind of key to most of our enjoyment of this, obviously the murder festival is not objectively kosher but as a reflection of a character’s headspace there seems to be a shift from total despair and isolation to communitarian bliss that is gratifying to experience

I def didnt read her screaming as simply being a reaction to his infidelity. He sucked and their relationship sucked but I feel like if I was her in that situation and looked through the keyhole and saw my partner in the middle of the horrifying nightmare image of that pagan sex ritual, my reaction wouldnt be wouldnt be "omg i cant believe my partner is cheating on me!"

none of us are saying this

lol again i can't believe i'm in the position of arguing in favor of this film, starting to think i loved it

I Think I Love You is a different Partridge Family song.

Here's another one: would this movie have worked without ... any of the outsiders but Dani and Christian? The others really don't bring much to the party, which is perhaps why no one misses them when they vanish. They're just fodder, killed off one at a time after they transgress, in true horror film fashion.

xp Brad tbf wins is saying it? Like obviously we all agree there is more going on in that moment than just her being upset at her bf having sex with that girl, my read was that the infidelity itself wasnt the main factor in precipitating her screaming breakdown, but w/e, the scene is open to lots of different takes, its nbd. Again, I thought that was the best scene in the movie.

Xp Well the film does follow a horror movie template, very deliberately.

Christian’s friends are essential to the dynamic imo. The brits are a more interesting addition cause they seem completely benign and don’t “deserve” to die even by our fictive standards (which are different from real life I just want to stress again that I am not in favour of murdering anyone except in the case of friends with right wing brain worms)

Hmm. Well, the British guy is the loudest (only?) to freak out after the suicide ritual, so he has to go - disrespectful and disruptive and all that. The British girl, her biggest death sentence was ... also being loud and complaining and asking to leave? Christian's friends all do more traditional "bad things." But I don't think they add much to the dynamic. In fact, I don't think there's much of a dynamic at all? Just an odd bunch of erstwhile buds waiting for their doom. But anyway, everyone was brought there to die (with spares), so it was strange to me (horror movie tropes or no), that they were killed one at a time, and mostly after they did something "deserving" of death. I mean, if they were all going to die, why wait for butthead to pee on the family tree? Just kill them all and put them in the barn.

What do you think, was Christian always going to die after he was put out to stud, or would he have been kept around as a breeder if her cooperated?

xp

I think “get(ting) past the objective context” is kind of key to most of our enjoyment of this, obviously the murder festival is not objectively kosher but as a reflection of a character’s headspace there seems to be a shift from total despair and isolation to communitarian bliss that is gratifying to experience

No I get that & it makes sense that she gets to that place in the end. Yeah I guess I was just so horrified by all that preceded it that it felt more emotionally ambiguous to me. For me it felt like the ending of Taxi Driver - Travis achieves his goals and winds up "happy", we as viewers understand that the bigger picture is more complicated, the intellectual frisson comes from the disconnect between those two ideas.

i'd say the idea you hit on there is otm for me

also the score for this is phenomenal

Krlic did a great job. I would love a piece comparing the closing fanfares in Aster's two features.

I saw this a second time because a friend was keen to watch it and what stood out to me was how sparing the violence is. Even the overt gore of the first cliff diver's head is limited to two shots. It's easy to imagine visiting the commune on an average year and having a perfectly nice time!

Eh. I think it's fair to say that the violence in the cliff diver sequence is more ott than even the average gore. Same with the guy flayed and suspended with his back peeled open and his lungs exposed (whether or not that's supposed to be a some kind of hallucination). But otherwise, yeah, it's one of the ways this movie subverts horror tropes (while still having it both ways). Usually in a horror film someone wanders off, then there is a death scene. In this movie, by and large people just wander off and disappear, but it's pretty clear they meet grisly fates. One guy gets the Leatherface treatment with a hammer to the head. Another guy is flayed open. Is it Christian who, when he is freaking out, sees a leg inexplicably sticking out of the ground, like it was planted there? And then there is plenty of rotting viscera and body parts. Yeah, that's pretty subtle, but it could be that we all are inured to seeing this kind of stuff in movies. It's like when people talk about Texas Chainsaw and note, you know, there really isn't that much gore in it! Which is true. But of course it's still extremely violent and shocking and bloody. Just not 90 minutes of dismemberment or whatever.

Who do you think washes all these pristine white robes? That job must suck.

Was the vagina dentata of the eviscerated bear a little too on the nose?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPGaPTdno10

he discusses the "happy" ending in the first question here

Interesting, and interesting answer, thanks for posting that! Maybe it gets to the crux of some issues I have with it, in that he concedes that for every character *but* Dani it is essentially a pretty standard addition to the folk-horror genre, but *for* Dani it's a cathartic break-up wish-fulfillment fairy tale. Embracing both of those things at once is definitely challenging for me. It would be like watching a Friday the 13th movie where for 95% of the cast, yeah, it's a slasher film, but for one character specifically it's a movie about coming to grips with the divorce of her parents, her sister's battle with depression and struggling with a sense of self-worth in a gig economy. Like, a collision of high and low that's hard (for me at least) to balance.

that friday the 13th movie exists, it is called friday the 13th part vii the new blood

Kinda, yeah. That one's pretty batshit, but not too bad, compared to what comes next.

I love that he is a huge fan of "A.I.".

i mean minus the gig economy and sister stuff but it’s about a psychic teen who accidentally killed her father who’s being gaslighted by her mother and her psychiatrist, and she accidentally resurrects jason while she’s having an emotional breakdown, and it’s pretty easy to read the film as: jason murdering everyone in her life who sucks is the unleashed expression of her own unconscious

I feel like we might be divided among the line of those who identify w Dani at some level and those who (subconsciously or consciously) wish to protect her.

That vid is the interview I’ve been talking about, it’s on the film comment podcast - def recommend. As well as AI he goes on at length about 45 years, which I still need to see

it makes so much sense to me that he loves ai, one of the most ruthlessly emotionally cruel films i've ever seen

I agree, but a lot of it hinges on whether as an AI robot David can feel or how he feels or does it matter that he's a robot that can feel, or even what it means to "feel." Juggling those aspects of "A.I." I find wrenching, but I think it's based on the inherent complexity and nuance of the scenario. This one maybe lacked that for me, and the more I think about it, yeah, the more I think the early murder-suicide stuff is an extraneous distraction.

i went in wanting to like this, but unfortunately it's terrible lazy smug indulgent horseshit filmmaking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiwMICAVwGo

The group screaming scene had real emotional weight, but ultimately I think the horror movie got in the way. Maybe I was rooting for the cult; I wanted them to be more legitimately sympathetic and mysterious, as in that scene. Human sacrifice just seems a bit predictable.

are you people still here?

Nine days, iirc

josh you love this movie

Saw it last night. Loved it. Much more so than Hereditary

Things I especially liked:

- Maybe the most true-to-life depiction of the psilocybin experience I've seen on film
- Speaking of which, Will Poulter provided some excellent light relief and his character was really well realised, right down to the vape
- Florence Pugh's stressed/agonised/anxiety-ridden facial expressions were spot-on
- Pelle and his calm/creepy Swedish brother were also great
- Soundtrack was incredible
- Such a pretty film. A cool idea to set a horror movie outdoors in the sunshine with very few night time scenes

i really loved this movie

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.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Tuesday, July 9, 2019 5:50 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

sorry if this has already been addressed (not reading this whole thread) but pelle says his parents burned up in a fire, implying after the fact that they sacrificed themselves like ingmar and that other dude who are alive in the burning temple

I liked this a lot, but feel like its structure didn't lend itself well to the themes it was ostensibly trying to explore. You could arguably have gotten rid of all the ancillary characters who get picked off and it wouldn't have had that much impact on the core story.

re: Pelle's parents, I feel like they were trying to make that implication, but it doesn't line up with the "every 90 years" timescale. The film's never totally clear on which parts of the festival take place every year and which are only once in 90 years. That's a minor quibble, but it bugged me.

sorry if this has already been addressed (not reading this whole thread) but pelle says his parents burned up in a fire, implying after the fact that they sacrificed themselves like ingmar and that other dude who are alive in the burning temple

― na (NA), Monday, July 15, 2019

that was my conclusion too

I haven't seen the movie yet (and probably never will because I am a big wuss) but maybe there's an implication that the cult ages unnaturally as a result of their rituals that makes the timeline work and Pelle not a liar?

I will now go back to lurking since I haven't seen the movie

There's actually a detailed breakdown at one point of how the cult treats different ages like seasons, but they're all measured in normal years afaict