Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR (2019)

Yea, at least put him in a wolf suit ffs

Avoided this thread until seeing the film last night, didn't realize we'd gotten to the spoilery bits already!

Although, unlike Hereditary's twists, you pretty much know where Midsommar is going as soon as they head for the commune. Like Texas Chainsaw, noted upthread, this sets up the family vs. the interlopers and you just wait for the inevitable to happen. The over-ther-topness of some of this also reminded me of Ken Russell's The Devils, a film I haven't seen in 40 years but whose atmosphere still lingers.

I didn't like this nearly as much as Hereditary. The ending, especially, felt to me like trying to outdo Hereditary by upping the crazy.

Still processing it, but somewhere betweenI went in wanting to like this, but unfortunately it's terrible lazy smug indulgent horseshit filmmaking and This is easily one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

My experience in dealing with different kinds of therapy can be summarized as follows. When I was first doing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, I felt as if the basis tenet of it is "nothing is wrong, your mind is distorting things". All problems you might be facing are just "distortions"-- your work anxiety, your relationship anxiety, your social anxiety. It's not a bad theory, but there's a major roadblock. I was reading "Feeling Good" and one of the problems put forth by a CBT patient was, "I don't want to die alone, gay and abandoned and depressed." The doctor's response was, literally, "that's just ridiculous". I was appalled. It's not ridiculous, and there is no distortion in thinking you're going to die alone, gay and abandoned and depressed. That is literally what is going to happen.

And I started to think CBT wasn't solving actual problems. It was helping with the anxiety, but not helping with dealing with real-life. It was trying to convince me that "nothing is wrong" but everything was wrong. CBT wasn't making my boyfriend love me again, wasn't improving my financial or social situation. It was after I turned to mindfulness that I started to find ways of actually dealing with actual problems.

Mindfulness, in contrast, doesn't teach you that "nothing is wrong", but that "everything is wrong, and you can be OK with that". The most succinct and extreme statement that I've read in this field of discourse is Pema Chodron's famous quote: "Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible in us be found." The inevitability of aging and death and so on must be accepted and, possibly, even celebrated. Hopelessness should be seen as an ideal state, as hope only brings suffering.

The dichotomy of these two methods of psychological treatment were, I felt, represented at the core of this movie. I don't think it was a coincidence that the movie began and ended with three deaths. Dani's sister's murder-suicide was represented as brutal, terrifying, painlessly achieved and yet still gruesome and terrible. Christian's death at the end was painful, beautiful, simultaneously grieved and celebrated by the Hårgas. Cars and piping and duct tape, compared to bear sewing and house burning? It's not just the murders, either: Dani is taking the Western drug-of-choice Ativan at the beginning of the movie, and at the end of the movie is meditating, dancing, reflecting, and taking natural drugs.

I first got that Pema Chodron quote in my head in the Ättestupa scene. The Hårgas had accepted their position in the Earth's cycle so fully that even dying didn't scare them. Simon and Connie flip out and just see gore, but Dani, as revolted as she may have been, seemed to pick up on the logic of what was happening. The extreme commitment of the Hårgas to "exposing themselves to annihilation" included enacting extremely gory ritual deaths upon the visitors and burning themselves alive. Viewers of the movie who don't vibe with the logic of Hårgan psychology won't find the movie rewarding, but like I said, I found the ending to be exhilarating (and the opening, the murder-suicide scene, to be the only legitimately terrifying scene in the movie).

In short, I think this movie fails as horror because it's trying to do the opposite of what horror movies try to do. Horror wishes to shock you, but Ari Aster has this "Irreversible" style of filmmaking, beginning with the most gruesome sequence, and then wearing you down until, by the end, the formality of the house-burning is meant to be seen as comforting. It bears more commonality to my mind to historical religious rituals of "purification", death metal, etc.

great post. although i think if you're ambivalent about the cult's ideology, which most viewers likely are, the horror still works. i felt a sense of dread from dani's slide into paganism, the upending of her conventional morality is underway without her realizing it and there's no going back, like how you can't start untripping once the psychedelic experience starts, no matter how you now feel about it.

In short, I think this movie fails as horror because it's trying to do the opposite of what horror movies try to do. Horror wishes to shock you

i disagree with this definition of horror, so it doesn't "fail" for me as a horror movie. it shares a ton of themes with horror

I didn't like this nearly as much as Hereditary. The ending, especially, felt to me like trying to outdo Hereditary by upping the crazy.

i also don't really understand this criticism, which i've seen elsewhere so i'm possibly just wrong! but the ending felt way calmer and less crazy to me than hereditary, with way fewer ideas being thrown around in the final twenty minutes

I mean, some of the criticisms I’ve read about Midsommar seem to hinge upon its success in “scaring” the audience, which I feel is missing the point of the film. It also occurred to me that this film has much in common with “Possession”

it does!!!! and yeah, it is not a "scary" movie, but i sort of think of this like "not all effective comedy makes you laugh" etc.

seeing this tomorrow (wedding anniversary date night lol)

godspeed

fantastic posts, fgti

Still haven't seen this and am avoiding all thread conversation till then BUT thought you might be interested

Film Society of Lincoln Center - Saturday, August 17, 6:45pm (Q&A with Ari Aster)
Midsommar (Director's Cut)
Ari Aster, USA, 2019 - World Premiere
Scary Movies is excited to premiere the official, nearly three-hour director’s cut of the acclaimed sophomore feature from Ari Aster (Hereditary) in a special Saturday night screening. American grad student Dani (Florence Pugh), grieving after a shocking loss, accompanies her boyfriend and his buddies on their vacation to a tight-knit farming commune in the sunny Swedish countryside. They’ve timed their trip to participate in an extravagant nine-day festival celebrating the summer solstice, with hallucinogenic drugs in abundance and a Nordic sun that hardly seems to set, but things quickly take a dark turn in this singular, unflinching, utterly contemporary entry in the fish-out-of-water folk-horror canon. An A24 release.

this movie does not need to be three hours long but i'm curious

"It's just a three hour movie, can't be too weird.*

*Lincoln Center blood rites, Brad burned in a bear suit*

Great posts, fgti.

This wasn’t, to me, a horror movie, except for the first twenty minutes, that was the scary part

The beginning being the scary part of the film was one of the first things I said when coming out of it - that aloneness is so terrifying. On the other hand, though, I do think this is very much a horror film! I think a lot of times when the "not really horror" tag is applied to a film it's based on a misunderstanding or underestimation of what horror is, what it's for and what it can do. Not accusing you of not understanding horror, mind you, just... I feel like the attitude so often stems from a place of disdain of the genre.

Dani didn’t need a boyfriend, Dani needed family and empathy, she burned Christian in my opinion to sever her last connection to her trauma.

My one caveat is that I don’t think that Christian is a bad boyfriend, so much as an accurate representation of a partner who doesn’t understand/is exhausted by/doesn’t know how to deal with a severely traumatized partner

I really like the reading of his death as her severing her connection to her trauma rather than a revenge ritual, though I didn't read it that way myself and I do think he's a bad boyfriend. While I might have over-egged the BURN THE BAD BOYFRIEND upthread, I think the film definitely provides this intentionally, along with his friends being dickheads, as a "romp" element that provides a base layer for the exploration of Dani's trauma.

I glanced at the script, and there's at least one important-seeming scene involving animal sacrifice which isn't in the film.

https://www.docdroid.net/39EggEN/midsommar.pdf

Great posts from both fgti and Emily.

Not accusing you of not understanding horror, mind you, just... I feel like the attitude so often stems from a place of disdain of the genre.

I think, like Emily said so succinctly, this movie is a proper Horror movie. "Not really horror" applied to films usually is, indeed, disdain of the genre, but also not understanding the genre is more than blood and gore and triggering screams (not in this thread, but it's a commonplace). "Not really horror" represents a very narrowly defined, 2D definition of horror which I don't ascribe to. The first 25 minutes of this are acute, terrible (=great) horror to me. Best I've seen in years.

I really like the reading of his death as her severing her connection to her trauma rather than a revenge ritual

Same here, this was an enlightening take.

just saw this, wondering how a remake with saorse ronan and chris pratt would do. also wondering if there are secret swedish jokes that were not translated.

I'm curious about the 3 hour cut

That's how long it takes to prep the bear.

has anybody seen this movie on mushrooms yet

gimme a second

Not too much here, but worth a read. It's a conversation between Aster and Eggers, apparently good buds:

https://a24films.com/notes/2019/07/deep-cuts-with-robert-eggers-and-ari-aster

just saw this with tt

it was superlative

we agreed it was v kind of aster to make a film about her (we also agreed i am a slight upgrade on christian)

but this was not so much horror as a sort of processional drama with strong comic elements. we laughed more or less throughout

the end was euphoric and exactly how it was always going to be

fgti, emily etc all otm

also all you Florence Pugh fans, get on The Falling if you haven't already

"about her"

abt tt? Be careful out there!

Learning Florence Pugh is dating Zach fucking Braff was a downer, but yeah she's great, and y'all see The Falling.

lol relax. i'm too fat to fit inside a bearskin

We're all trapped in a bearskin, in our own way.

(tt plz not to murder lj thx)

just gotta be not shit! :D

but yeah this was as much about grief and trauma as anything more directly bad-boyfriend-burning

funniest moment btw: the jester hat

Game the kids are playing earlier? Skin the Fool.

This was funnier than the Wicker Man!

Five bags of popcorn plus a little glass of hallucinogenic tea

that's had some blood dripped into it

it's not as good as Hereditary - no one in the film is as good as Toni Collette, the racial stuff is elided in a suspect way, it's way too long and could have been more succinctly edited. Those are the only knocks against it though.

lol at arguing over its genre placement, this is totally a horror movie - the checklist of genre tropes embedded and toyed with in the film is very long.

this thread is a bitch to wade through so apologies if I'm rehashing anything but I did note emil.y's post above:

The whole film is about the terror of feeling pain alone vs the community's sharing of your pain. It's about the difference between gasping quietly in a toilet so nobody hears you having a panic attack vs screaming and having everyone around you scream with you.

This is key. The sect processes trauma by acknowledging it, ritualizing it, and expelling it in a way that, perhaps most importantly, both externalizes it (sacrificing outsiders) and perpetuates it (sacrificing its own members). This is a kind of horrific evil that becomes attractive when you have no other way available to process your own trauma. Dani isn't free from her trauma at the end by any means: she *owns* it, she controls it via the power of the community, it has been harnessed and circumscribed. It has been integrated into her sense of self and into the wider community.

The racial politics of this though... it's bizarre to cast Josh as a black character (and Connie and her fiancee as brown characters) and then not in any way address the racial dynamics involved with a bunch of Nordic white people, who are fixated on bloodlines and breeding, murdering them. Like, no characters - not even the non-white characters themselves - *ever* acknowledge this? In the scene at their house prior to the trip Josh has a book on the table titled "The Secret Nazi Language of the Hraxthur" or something like that, clearly he would be aware of the racial aspect and histories of such cults and would at the very least feel some sense of exclusion/otherness, but this is never conveyed. And then the film leans into his conventional "black guy in a horror film" role... idk it was disconcerting. So much of this film felt carefully constructed and deliberate, and this aspect of it seemed not so well thought out.

And then the film leans into his conventional "black guy in a horror film" role

can you expand on this? bc i don't know what you're referring to here

well the whole film is structured around the classic "group of friends under threat" horror scenario, whereby each member is picked off/killed by a predator in succession, often for some apparent transgression, either implied or explicit (ie, having sex, violating a taboo, or for no other reason than being black). For reference: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackDudeDiesFirst

Josh's role in the film checks a number of those boxes - he's not top billed, he's the lone black guy, he's also the "most important" in the sense that he's given the most to do/has the most detailed understanding of what's going on, etc.

he has an explicit transgression that is not "no other reason than being black"

Right. Could also argue that he technically doesn't die first, because the other two brown people do.

you are right that the movie pretty much ignores that josh is black. i'm not sure that's problematic, but what do i know. i didn't feel like it made the film more illogical or unbelievable.

Will Poulter's character dies first, no?

No, Britishers first, right?

the East Asian Britishes die first

they are also, perhaps not coincidentally, the least fleshed out and obviously their function in the film is to be expendable

anyway my point isn't just that the movie ignores that Josh is black - it ignores that racially fixated white people kill a bunch of brown people *while never bringing it up that this is happening*

I found this interesting, although it gets a few facts wrong: https://www.graveyardshiftsisters.com/2019/07/how-midsommar-utilizes-and-subverts.html

When I was watching it I felt like they'd written the script, realised it could end up an *entirely* white cast, and made sure to avoid that by casting PoC, but as Οὖτις points out, didn't really change the script to acknowledge that there's a huge pre-existing dynamic at play. Maybe they thought it would change the theme of the film too much to make it a big deal, but they could have mentioned it at least a bit. I feel like I'm on pretty uncertain ground with this, though.

I'm not black (although I am named Josh lol) but as a Jew if you plunked me down into a northern European cult setting you can be sure as shit one of the main things on my mind would be the racial dynamic/history involved and how that would be a potential threat to me personally. My "otherness" would be foremost in my mind.

I get the logic of ignoring the racial aspect in the script, since it doesn't really tie in with any of the major themes Aster is interested in. But it did feel like a missed opportunity to at least poke fun at the sheer whiteness of these occult groups

as I suspected, the script makes no reference to the characters' races

The biggest missed opportunity for cultural comedy is that this film about Nordic hippies has characters staying in huts where you can constantly hear babies crying and the first thing a character asks is “where do we jerk off”, and ilx has not dealt with this at all

lol