Midsommar

A few tips if you are ever invited to a summer solstice festival in northern Sweden: don't take a piss on the ancestral tree, don't drink everything that is offered you, and winning the crown of May queen isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Of course the best advice is not to go at all, because it seems you won't return.

Midsommar is Ari Aster's follow-up to the excellent Hereditary. Like that film, this one is about religion gone horribly bad--Hereditary had demon worship, this one paganism with ritual sacrifice. The end of Hereditary, out of context, was very silly, but worked because of the sustained horror that preceded it. In Midsommar, the silliness begins much earlier, and because there are no real shocks, by the end of the film you could be rolling your eyes.

The film centers around a young woman (Florence Pugh) and the relationship with her boyfriend (Jack Reynor). In essence, Midsommar is a film about a breakup, albeit one that occurs during a Swedish festival. She is emotionally needy, especially after a family tragedy, while he is aloof. It is only a few weeks before he is scheduled to leave that she finds out he is going to Sweden to attend the festival with three friends: William Jackson Harper, who is doing his graduate thesis on European summer festivals; Will Poulter, who is the token obnoxious guy; and Vilhelm Blomgren, who comes from the commune that will be hosting them. Feeling guilty, Reynor invites Pugh to come along with him.

The members of the commune all wear white, and their buildings are of aerodynamic design. When asked about the potential for incest, one elder replies that they are aware of it, and try to bring in new people, which is the warning the characters should have heeded. The constant sunlight starts to get to them as well, but isn't until witnessing a ritual suicide that the American characters get an idea that this isn't such a sweet and cuddly group of people.

Midsommar is creepy and disturbing, but not really scary. It is also very long (147 minutes) and muddled--we are told that the festival occurs every ninety years, but there are photos of recent May queens, and Blomgren indicates that his parents were part of a more recent festival. Also, Aster seems to have conflated two different pagan holidays--May queens, as the name suggests, are part of a celebration on May 1st, while the summer solstice is on June 21st. Perhaps these people combine them to save on travel costs.

Pugh is quite good as an emotionally damaged woman in a situation that she is not cut out for. It's interesting that Aster cast three non-Americans (Pugh and Poulter are English, Reynor is Irish) in the roles. The film was shot in Hungary, not Sweden.

It must have been on the strength of Hereditary that Aster got this movie made, because it's hard to imagine any typical executive being enthused about the very strange subject matter. Given that this summer is full of tired sequels and reboots, at least it's original. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "It is better to fail in originality than succeed in imitation."