Ari Aster's MIDSOMMAR (2019)

the only thing she really lacks is the self-confidence to assert her needs, but after seeing how her concerns are trivialized from the _very start_ by her dick boyfriend, it seems like more a function of her youth and clinging to the one guy who is a constant after tragedy strikes

if her family hadn't died at the very beginning, she might have dumped his ass by the time the rest of the movie took place! instead she's clinging to the dude who was like "oh, you're sister is nuts and you can't keep responding to her. everything's probably fine"

Yeah I didn't really know how to respond so I just dropped it.

like many o_O comments, it reveals the commenter's bias rather than adding anything interesting to the discussion (calling someone annoying is always like that too)

finally got around to this. i suppose the first line of commentary should be complimentary as i do think it's a good film (if not nearly as good as Hereditary) so the stand-outs in my mind are Florence Pugh (who is fantastic) and the outrageously good Haxan Cloak soundtrack. Aster is a great stylist and has the chops to be a great filmmaker and this movie shows it; everything - and there's a lot! - is very well executed and captured. It is also remarkably funny throughout!

My main issues are that as a horror movie it is outrageously bone stupid and plays its cards wildly and openly to the point of nearly killing the hook... "what's there to say? it's a bear," indeed. The characters are all one-dimensional and uniformly moronic in their reactions. I'd be less frustrated by that if it weren't for Aster's sadistic streak, not so much for his actors (though you can make that argument too) as toward the audience. He's so relentlessly manipulative and painfully creepy it gets under my skin.

like i bet i would catch a lot of nuances and interesting things on a second viewing but i don't need the agita frankly.

On what grounds would one allege he's sadistic to actors? Cause he gets them to play traumatized? Actors live for that shit.

My opinion on Astor has coalesced to - so-so and quite lazy writer, brilliant enough director and ideas man that that doesn't really matter.

I just read that Astor came to this movie as a work-for-hire project!

My main issues are that as a horror movie it is outrageously bone stupid and plays its cards wildly and openly to the point of nearly killing the hook... "what's there to say? it's a bear," indeed. The characters are all one-dimensional and uniformly moronic in their reactions. I'd be less frustrated by that if it weren't for Aster's sadistic streak, not so much for his actors (though you can make that argument too) as toward the audience. He's so relentlessly manipulative and painfully creepy it gets under my skin.

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Wednesday, November 27, 2019 12:33 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

totally agree with all of this but also think he's a shitty tryhard director

http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2019/12/28/detail/midsommar-directors-cut
$15 for a screening of the director's cut (a half hour more? what would you add?) and a talkback with aster.

by the majority of accounts the Director's Cut adds nothing essential

more closeups of smashed faces?

the humanist in me is repulsed by that
but the Cannibal Corpse in me is excited

I didn’t notice anything different when I watched the longer cut. I had to look up what was added.

I preferred the non-director's cut. The extended scenes messed with the pacing of the movie imho.

I keep wanting to respond to the couple of negative posts before the bump, but honestly I don't even see how some of that criticism can be argued against as it seems like kind of a personal thing (whether an artist is "creepy" and/or "manipulative", let alone "tryhard"). Still one of the more unique, interesting, and gripping films I've seen recently (I don't see many, tbh), and I'm glad to see Pugh's name on some year end and awards nomination lists.

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. It's also about BURNING YOUR FUCKING SHIT BOYFRIEND because HE'S FUCKING SHIT.

Showed this to a friend going through the end of a six year relationship and this was hugely otm for her.

Yeah this was not very scary or even disturbing but it was enormously cathartic in its depiction of the primal violence of grief and busted relationships. The group scream session was very moving to me!

It scared and disturbed the shit out of me!

I mean, also very funny in the “oh he went to do something” moments with screaming in the distant background

The director's cut added a cool scene with another Horga ritual at a lake followed by an important and engaging fight between Dani and Christian. It also added in the funniest line in the movie (the JSTOR bit). But I think it really overemphasized how shitty Christian was to the point that he went from a typical self-involved dick to a total villain. I felt that kind of detracted from the ending.

Just saw the movie recently so missed the whole debate upthread. Sorry if I say things that have already been said.

I spent the whole movie wondering how the tragedy she experienced at the beginning was going to link up and be relevant by the end. I kept thinking: why murder-suicide? Why the sister killing the parents? Why can't it just be any loss, why does it have to be this? And then everything fell into place in a perfect, satisfying way when I saw her smile.

Because it's not just about catharsis, or shared screaming/pain, though both of those things are part of it. It's also that at the beginning of the movie, Dani lives in a world where people simply don't accept that things like that happen. That's why Christian is so dismissive of her worries, it's why he and his friends don't freak out even as people start disappearing around them - because in their reality, there's no room for things like what happened to Dani. So Dani is utterly alone, and she has no way to think about what happened to her, or process it, or start to move on. And I think that's an accurate depiction of the way people react to something that horrific; if it only happens to Other People, that means that someone it does happen to becomes unreachably Other.

Thus the appeal of the cult; this is a place where this exact kind of thing does happen, and (as I think someone said upthread) it's ritualized and normalized. Sure, they make it happen. But that can have an appeal in itself; when you know that horrific things happen, making them happen can be a way of maintaining some kind of control.

So it makes perfect sense for Dani to end by feeling at home in the cult; she finally lives in a culture that has a context for what's happened to her, that can give her a way to make sense of something senseless. That doesn't mean it's a good thing. It would obviously be better if she could get that sense of shared catharsis/context for trauma from something other than a creepy murder cult that's manipulating her in order to recruit her as breeding stock. But I think the movie gets at something real about trauma and the way it opens people up to things like cults (or religions, or fandoms, or what have you), and I think it was beautifully done.

yes

good take!

Really good. Thanks, Lily.

my feeling was that--within the logic of the movie--that the "cult" were admirable for the exacting communal moral standards that they held to. it's not a "cult" in the modern sense because it's not built around a charismatic powerful individual--it's like a genuine commune because all demands, harsh as they were, were made to all alike. theirs a genuine subsumption of individuality that's not predicated on surrendering your ego to the one in charge but to all. that's why the catharsis moved me--she didn't just find a new individual to (fail to) take on the burden of her emotions but found something more primal. that Aster doesn't portray the commune as utopian is to the logic of the genre but also seems to add some interesting moral complexity: is this what a real community would look like, what it would ask of us? figuratively speaking, of course

worst hyped movie of 2019 by far. europe is gross

one eye open otm itt. i mostly experienced frustrated unintelligible boredom while watching this and didn’t unpack it much, but having read your posts, i feel galvanized; I’m rich with articulate reasons for hating this film! and that’s what reading posts is all about

It scared and disturbed the shit out of me!

― babu frik fan account (mh), Friday, December 27, 2019 11:10 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

curious any specific scenes in which you were scared? i can think of like, 2 tops that were plausibly scary

I still think about the opening suicide scene and feel sick.

flops if you're so rich with articulate reasons for hating this film.... why don't you articulate some of them

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

― One Eye Open, Wednesday, July 10, 2019 5:18 AM (five months ago) bookmarkflaglink

i would say this is incredibly wrong

i also don't particularly give a shit that the movie never diverted from what i expected would happen, but i don't care about what happens in stories, i care about how it happens

otm.

also if i've learned anything from being a horror fan, what people find scary is as subjective as what people find funny

found this film far, FAR more funny than scary. also, i loved it

it's very funny! and it's very aware of how it is funny

it's a really effective satire among many other things

i also don't particularly give a shit that the movie never diverted from what i expected would happen, but i don't care about what happens in stories, i care about how it happens

IME with the passage of some time, it seems like a lot of the people who got way more out of this movie than i did approached it with an appreciation/tolerance of horror genre cinema & its tropes that I guess I just dont have. Like the fact that it didnt divert from what I expected would happen was legit surprising to me and felt like kind of a bait & switch w/r/t the arthouse tone vs what was delivered plotwise. So a lot of the stuff that came off to me as formulaic/redundant/obvious ticking off of genre checkboxes ('place being set up as ominous place where murders will happen', 'characters getting killed off one by one') I guess just didnt bother ppl who are fine with that stuff.

Ditto a lot of the humor people describe. I was legit shocked to hear people talking about how funny they found this movie, and i thought ppl were trolling at first when they mentioned stuff like the guy screaming while burning or hearing screams in the distance as being hilarious moments, but I guess if you're more steeped in an appreciation of those genre tropes then you can enjoy that stuff in a more meta/camp way than I did. Tl,dr:this was just Not For Me I guess.

I'm not a horror buff but the processional surprise-free plot was an important aspect of the experience imo - as with something like Melancholia (which I may have already said is perhaps this film's most direct antecedent), we all know what's coming, but we must live it

I love horror and its tropes, I love Hereditary, I think this guy is really talented and want to see all of the movies that he makes. But I didn't think this was scary, and I sure didn't think it was funny - I wish it was funny! - so there's that. I do like meta, but I'm not a big fan of camp, maybe that's the/a problem I had. I also think it felt (from memory) a little too thematically vague. There are lots of things going on, but too many ideas are just kind of thrown out there, imo. Like the inbred oracle or whatever. Or even the suicide at the beginning.

anyones mileage may vary but tbh for me this wave of A24 & related-style arthouse horror movies like this & Saint Maud & etc often just feels to me like finding a way to enjoy the gore & taboo of 70s exploitation/genre stuff but in a high class wrapper.

tbf, i like the low class wrapper stuff too... i guess that's blumhouse?

lol They showed the trailer for Saint Maud before Uncut Gems at this little arthouse theatre in Florida, and the old people there (most of the crowd) was noooot having it.

I didn't think it was campy at all. It's also not particularly scary; it's unsettling, and it's funny at times. But I found it a moving meditation on trauma; I think Lily Dale hit the nail on the head.

idk saint maud looks kinda tight. what 70s exploitation is it elevating

re "high-class wrapper" yeah it's crazy that people like movies more when they actually have production values and good acting and themes/concepts

i thought the magic mushroom scenes early in the film were both hilarious and one of the truest depictions of tripping I've seen in any film

re "high-class wrapper" yeah it's crazy that people like movies more when they actually have production values and good acting and themes/concepts

also those themes/concepts are not absent from aster's trashier antecedents

tbf i paid $ to see Green Inferno, def not saying im above trash