Review: "Midsommar"

 

ASTER, Ari (Dir.), “Midsommar”, A24/BR.F/Square Peg/Lionsgate, 2019.

Have you ever heard an instance of glossolalia? The so called “speaking in tongues” has quite a musical quality to it, with rising and falling intonations and cadences and mild interweaving musical themes. Some people find it strangely thrilling and soothing – either because of its mysterious origin (as an instance of supposedly divine inspiration and contact), or because its mere presence is interpreted as a manifestation of The Beyond. Personally, I find it quite grating to listen to. It wanders; it never seems to know where it’s headed; it’s endlessly reiterative and tentative-sounding – like someone trying half-heartedly to pick out a Philip Glass piece on a piano. It sounds as though each individual performer is not totally committing to it and is sure that, at any moment, the whole thing might suddenly stop and so they’re trying their damnedest to not be the last one left crooning when that happens.

I bring this up because most of the soundtrack in this movie resembles glossolalia, albeit it is mostly instrumental, not vocal. At various points there are fiddles and flutes making endless glissandi and arpeggios in the background and – while at times it’s quite lovely to hear – it eventually becomes fairly drone-like and annoying. I think this is intentional. The people in this story are, for the most part, quite mad, and this soundtrack is certainly emblematic of what must be passing through their heads.

Horror fare, especially in the UK, has taken a sharp turn toward the Folk Department of late and these kinds of narratives – of bloodthirsty rural traditions irrupting out into the modern sunshine – are definitely seeing a revival. Magazines such as “The Ghastling” and “Hellebore” are attempting to breathe new life into the concept that was crystallized by such movies as “The Wicker Man” and “Witch-Finder General”; Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery”; almost anything by Alan Garner; and 80s slasher flicks like “Children of the Corn”. The focus of this material is upon long-standing – supposedly, millennially-old – traditions linked to nature and the surrounding environment and the accompanying ritual behaviour designed to appease, or entice, natural forces, or to bring the community closer to some perceived natural, cyclical way of being. Sometimes, there is an actual supernatural entity in the background of all this activity; other times, it’s just crazy people who should know better.

Such it is with this present example. We meet Dani, a university-level psychology student who has just suffered the loss of her entire family at the hands of her schizophrenic sister, who gassed herself to death along with her parents. Dani’s grief and outrage is barely handled by her oxygen-thief boyfriend, Christian, who is meandering through an anthropology degree – mainly because of the opportunities for sex and drugs – along with his best buddies, Josh and Mark, a useless crowd who feel that Christian is being ‘pussy-whipped’ by his ‘frigid’ girlfriend and her ‘baggage’. A visiting student from Sweden named Pelle offers to take the guys away to his home country to see the high summer festivals of his home town: the guys decide that this is the moment that they can shake Christian free of Dani and have a sex-and-drug-filled holiday together; however, due to Christian’s mealy-mouthed attitude and general incompetence, Dani winds up learning of the plan and going to Sweden with them.

From here on in, we are introduced to the rural community from which Pelle originates and we see the outwardly friendly and welcoming attitude of the community’s denizens which throws into stark relief the bitchiness, shallowness and craven attitudes of entitlement displayed by Christian and his friends. This is a truly abhorrent bunch of people, driven by narrow impulses and expectations and firmly reliant on a belief that – being American – everyone will cut them some slack; even our heroine Dani has elements of this in her character. Well, the local villagers certainly cut them, I’ll give them that.

After showing up at the village, our crew is combined with an engaged British couple – Simon and Connie – brought to the festivities by Pelle’s brother Ingeborg. We don’t see much of them, but, on the whole, they are far better behaved and more perceptive than our Yanks, who fail repeatedly to see beyond themselves and their own desires. Consequently, these are the first two to ‘disappear’. After this, as the nine-days’ Summer festival rolls on its course, our group of visitors gets picked off one-by-one in an escalating series of horrific, brutal encounters, which our self-involved victims fail to see coming or deflect, so far up their own arses have they shoved their heads.

I was a bit conflicted about this. On the one hand, as a viewer of the movie, you can see the enfolding net of the villagers slowly enmeshing our party of adventurers, and it is truly calculated and chilling in its ramifications and effects. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine it happening to a more deserving group of people. My sympathies were nowhere: I disliked Pelle and Ingeborg for being the mendacious procurers that they become rewarded for being; I disliked the Elders with their casual brutality and twisted rationales; but I was also furiously annoyed with Mark for his hide-bound cultural insensitivity, and also the petty pissing match that takes place between Josh – who came to the village specifically to study its traditions for his thesis – and Christian who decides after that fact that he wants to write about the place as well. No-one is likable in this film; there’s no-one really to relate to. Dani is given our sympathy due to her horrific family troubles and the fact that she’s roped to a thoroughly despicable partner, but she gets railroaded along with everyone else and even her ‘shocking’ decision at the end has very little sting. It’s like the world just made a little garbage can for a select group of nasty humans to go and die in. Go planet!

Like a lot of these types of narratives, it’s not so much what happens to our victims but how. The village in this film is entirely constructed as a map into which our story falls, once we’ve left America and the populated bits of Sweden behind. Much of the village’s architecture is covered with drawing and murals which give hints to the viewer (certainly, none of our victims ever pick up on these tidbits) as to what might be coming next. The gateway into the village is a huge circular representation of the Sun; standing directly opposite this at the other end of the settlement is a yellow triangular house which, we’re told, is “off limits”: our narrative winds its way inevitably from one to the other. The villagers deflect curiosity and nosiness, and set up the demises of our characters with studied ease; in fact with an ease that is immediately apparent to the viewer and which has them yelling at the screen (in my case, at least) for these useless boneheads to wake up and smell the goddam coffee. Subtle, it ain’t. The two Brits are the only ones who sense that something is definitely stinky in Denmark and who make efforts to escape: their captures and deaths are the only moments when the villagers have to take extreme steps to avoid complete exposure. Our Americans, on the other hand, are completely fooled and grab what’s offered with both hands and little regard. Irritating.

Given the architectural and cultural detailing on display in this film, it’s clear that the director wanted to capture as much of it as possible for posterity. The sets and costumes, the set dressing, the landscape – it’s all lush and wonderful and the camerawork is just amazing to see. That being said, Aster treats it all like it’s a doll’s house, tiny figures moving in a constructed world, and this might be a deliberate choice. What it does though, is it puts all the characters into the middle- or far distance in each scene. There are close-up moments – mainly of Dani, and certainly ‘hero shots’ of each village Elder as they take their evil moment to shine – but the cast is mainly viewed as diminutive players on a vast stage, to the point where they become unidentifiable. As a particular case, Simon is only ever seen close up after he’s been horribly killed; for most of the proceedings otherwise, he’s a distant brown figure and an accent. Even dead, he’s had his lungs ripped out through his back and his eyes masked by flowers, so it wasn’t even initially clear that this was him. The same with Connie: at the finale a grey corpse on a wheelbarrow turns out to be hers but it’s not immediately obvious that it is, and it has to be inferred from context. (You will suffer if you don’t pay attention with this, folks!)

Finally, there’s the violence. This is harsh. The R-rating here is for the gruesome detail of bodily injuries and the lingering camera shots that display them. If hyper-realistic trauma damage is something that you’re not capable of easily withstanding, you might want to look elsewhere. The brutality here is casual and grotesque: no-one gets whacked on the head with a mallet where two or three well-aimed thumps will make sure. It’s all in stark contrast to the pretty white blouses and sunny countryside, which definitely ramps up the impact and drives the ugliness of it home. For the keen-eyed however, there are warnings in the wall murals and embroidered decorations, so you’ll at least have a slight chance to anticipate the worst of it.

For Mythos devotees, especially those with a yen for Ramsey Campbell’s works in that regard, there’s a nice nod to The Revelations of Gla’aki – the holy book of the Village Elders is a stream of consciousness rambling by a deliberately-generated inbred savant, created to keep the volume going into the future. It’s one of very many moments of extreme ickiness in this movie.

In the final analysis, what’s to like? This is a very well made and put together movie; the photography, the casting, the locations – it’s all a treat. The characters are all vibrant and well-realised, and their interactions and individual arcs – while not surprising – are believable and well-portrayed. It’s a very attractive vehicle. It will hardly surprise the viewer, however; there are no challenges to expectation at all: we know, going in, what to expect, and all of those things happen. It’s murky too (despite all of the bright sunshine): everything is shot too far away from the screen and we never really get a visual sense of the characters as anything other than distant puppets, highlighted by variations in colour. No-one here is a sympathetic person and I wasn’t even left wondering what might happen to Dani afterwards. This is a very long film that leaves no firm impression, apart from its stark gore and idiosyncratic soundtrack.

If folk horror is your bag, there are lots of interesting things happening online and in the world of print media at the moment. I suspect that, as far as cinematic versions of the form go, what's been done already will stand up as well, or even better, against what might turn up in the next few years. If you've seen "The Wicker Man" (the 1973 version with Edward Woodward, Britt Ekland, Ingrid Pitt and Christopher Lee; not the 2006 dreck with Nicolas Cage), or "Blood on Satan's Claw", then you've seen this film; it's definitely a love-note to those movies. It doesn't really add much that's new to the genre though.

Three-and-a-Half Tentacled Horrors (with flowers in their hair) from me.