RogerBW's Blog

Midsommar (2019) 28 June 2025

2019 horror, dir. Ari Aster, Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor: IMDb / allmovie. After the tragic death of her family, Dani goes along with her boyfriend and other anthropology students to visit a commune in Sweden…

And the first question I had, given the way this film was promoted, was: is this the smart horror that I've been asking for all these years? Are we going to see well-developed characters who act like real people when confronted with the horrifying situation?

No, it isn't. No, we really aren't.

The Swedish group who originated this Swedish-American co-production apparently had in mind a straightforward slasher film set in the commune in rural Sweden. All the character stuff was, we are told by all sides, added by the eventual director Ari Aster, who'd previously made Hereditary (2018) and would go on to Beau Is Afraid (2023).

But right up front, during the initial sequence as Dani finds out about the death of her family (unlike the events themselves, which are shot very well to make it clear what's going on without needing any speech), a certain lingering joy in showing the pretty woman suffering that will be a repeated theme through the film. Yes, I get it, for purposes of the story you need to show that she is devastated by these events. But you don't have to linger on it, you don't have to invite the audience to be complicit in your enjoyment as the camera leers at the tears on her face.

Then we get on to… well. In synopses, and even in some reviews, this sequence of Dani, her boyfriend, and later his fellow-student friends talking about what's happened to her, and the trip and adding her to it, is presented as good wholesome stuff. Christian is a supportive boyfriend, they say, and it's only later that things become weird.

Maybe I saw a different cut? Because the Christian I saw is a controlling arsehole who plays on Dani's insecurities to keep her bobbing along in his wake rather than going off and finding a partner who might actually like her rather than just needing something to fill the "pretty girlfriend" slot on his inventory. (Is this Ari Aster making an accidental feminist statement? I'm sure it's not a deliberate one.)

(This was Florence Pugh's breakthrough year, with this film, Fighting With My Family and the Greta Gerwig Little Women all starring her. So it's not surprising that she's the best actor here.)

Still, off we go to Sweden, and… it's The Wicker Man, isn't it? Except they haven't got the point of The Wicker Man, the thing that raises it above generic these-locals-are-nasty horror, which is that Sergeant Howie has plenty of chances to get out of his role as the sacrifice… but he turns them all down (granted, not fully understanding what this will lead to). Nobody here has a chance to get out of anything.

But first a scene that really defined the film for me. One of the students is an expert in Scandinavian runestones. I am not such an expert, but I do know that all surviving runestones are documented; there's a catalogue. So when he suddenly sees a stone in the commune, he should be saying either "aha, I wanted to get a look at this one close up" or "oh wow, here's one that isn't in the catalogue". He says neither of these things; he just explains to his friends what a runestone is.

There's a developmentally disabled guy used purely for "ooh he looks weird" value.

Aster keeps trying to do the same trick Spielberg used in Jurassic Park: we're looking at the cast, their eyes go wide as they see Something Amazing (over our shoulder, in effect), and then the audience is primed to be impressed when we cut to the Something. This worked reasonably well when the Something was state-of-the-art CGI dinosaurs. It's not so effective here where it's just another building, or just more people doing something very slightly unusual.

Of course the non-white people die first.

There's the beginning of a story about Dani's mental health after the events at the start of the film, but nobody ever treats her differently, or believes her any more or less than if she hadn't been traumatised.

And you know, I genuinely believe that Aster's intended message here is "huh, women. They catch you screwing some local chick and the next thing you know they're burning you alive. How unreasonable can you get?"

By the way, the May Queen is a spring concept, not a summer one.

Bah. Yeuch. This left a bad taste in my mouth.

Midsummer is of course a genuine festival time in Sweden. Ättestupa on the other hand was written as a parody or moral lesson, like Atlantis (in this case "look, these people are so amazingly happy and healthy that they have to choose to end their lives"), and then later folklorists took it seriously. And, you know, I've seen a lot of people falling to their deaths in films, but I've never seen a film before in which the director felt that if I didn't see them hitting the ground I might not be properly impressed.

I talk about this film further on Ribbon of Memes.

See also:
Fighting With My Family

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