Ari Aster's much-anticipated follow-up to Hereditary, is finally here, so horror fans
everywhere can dig into this sun-drenched piece of folk-horror.
Let's look at why Midsommar just might end up being the scariest movie of 2019.
Spoilers ahead.
Midsommar has been heavily marketed as a horror film that will scare you despite taking place
almost entirely in broad daylight.
Midsommar isn't the first film to do this, of course, as any fan of films like The Wicker
Man or Day of the Dead can attest.
It's not some kind of revolutionary breakthrough for horror, but as with many things in this
film, it's executed flawlessly.
As the film progresses, the daylight becomes such a threatening specter that you find yourself
almost praying for a little more darkness.
At least the darkness might cover up some of the gruesome events you're forced to see
in bright detail.
What time is it?
Nine PM."
"That can't be right, the sky is blue!"
"This is what nine PM is like here."
Midsommar is a film that largely had to be built from the ground up.
The village had to be assembled piece by piece, from the murals along the walls of the common
sleeping area to that ominous yellow triangle temple where it all comes to an end.
The village is an outgrowth of the film's mission to be a horrific movie experience
that takes place almost entirely in daylight.
It has to look like a place of celebration, because for the people who live there, it
is.
It also has to subtly look deeply ominous.
It has to look like a festival destination even as it becomes a prison.
The daylight of Midsommar carries with it an ominous mission statement.
You can close or cover your eyes.
None of its moments of emotional and physical darkness are matched with aesthetic darkness.
This is a bright film that will not look away.
Aster's camerawork in the film reinforces this mission statement.
While he certainly doesn't show us everything, the visual style of the film suggests a filmmaker
who wants to be an all-knowning eye in this world he's created.
That extends into the film's most graphically violent sequences, and moments in which another
filmmaker might cut away are instead pushed in on, more and more, until we're the ones
who flinch.
In Hereditary, Aster gave us everything from a little girl's head flying off to a decapitated
corpse floating up into a tree house.
The man is not afraid to pile on the gore, and that continues in Midsommar, a film that
brings that gore into the harsh daylight as often as possible.
Simply saying Aster is a director who enjoys putting gruesome moments in his films isn't
saying much.
A lot of horror directors have accumulated fame thanks to their relentless use of bucket
after bucket of blood.
What makes Aster's particularly gore style effective is how judicious he is with it.
Aster knows exactly how long to wait before dropping his deeply upsetting gore on us,
and his timing is what makes the violence work so well.
As relentless as Midsommar is in its assault on your senses, Aster knows from the beginning
that there needs to be some way to release the tension.
Much like another horror classic, Get Out, Midsommar uses humor for cool-down moments
and flashes of levity.
It all makes the ramp up to the real horror even scarier.
This is where the often unexpected and very welcome sense of humor of Midsommar comes
in.
This humor often lives largely in the character of Mark, played by Will Poulter.
He's more than happy to chase women around the village while puffing on his vape pen
and unknowingly taking a leak on the ashes of their ancestors.
Thanks to him, the film adds the horror of American tourists as an invasive species into
its narrative.
Midsommar is a creeper, in more ways than one.
It's a film that's not interested in delivering a scare-a-minute thrill ride.
Instead it creates a sense of dread that runs through the whole piece like a taut wire,
occasionally building to moments where you feel the wire might snap.
"Tomorrow's a big day."
"Is it scary?"
The May Queen dance competition near the end of the film, in which Dani is drugged and
coerced into a dance endurance ritual, is a master class in this kind of filmmaking.
As the dance goes on, she is swept along in the ecstasy of the movement, and the constantly
twirling tangle of women around the Maypole becomes a kind of transformative machine for
Dani, helping her to begin to become something else.
Through it all, there's a sense that at any moment the scene could explode into hideous,
relentlessly graphic violence.
Midsommar does not break the mold established by other folk-horror classics that have come
before it.
We know the writing is on the wall for our American visitors well before they do, we
just don't yet know how they'll come to meet their various ends.
Even when it becomes clear that Pelle has selected Dani as a candidate for May Queen,
we don't know if that means she's marked to die or marked to somehow survive and assimilate.
Then, as the film reaches its end, everything is laid out rather clearly.
Dani survives and she uses her newfound adoration among the people of the village to make her
boyfriend Christian their final sacrifice.
The preparation of the ritual and the unflinching camera work are all designed to make you nervous.
Then the screaming starts, and those nerves are released in an ecstasy of primal energy
that feels at once celebratory and horrifying.
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