‘Midsommar’ a brilliant failure
Don’t be misled by the middling rating attached to this review. “Midsommar” is anything but mediocre. It’s horrible and brilliant, a crashing failure but one with many good moments. What do you say about a movie that’s both a disgusting, tiresome and predictable endurance test and an irrefutable demonstration of real directorial talent?
Perhaps, this: Ari Aster is definitely someone who should be making movies. But maybe not this movie.
In an early scene, a young woman (Florence Pugh) is on the phone with her boyfriend. If you just pay attention to what they say, it’s a mundane conversation, but Aster films it with Pugh in close-up, and something in her manner and tone gives us the whole dynamic of the relationship: Dani loves him more than he loves her. She’s insecure, not because she’s an insecure person, but because he is making her that way.
Right there, Aster has our attention. He has the capacity to put us into the mind of his central characters and make us care about her. In this early part of “Midsommar,” the movie might easily be mistaken for a mumblecore film about the tribulations of broke, over-educated young people. Aster (“Hereditary”) doesn’t need the macabre and ghastly. He just likes it that way.
“Midsommar” revolves around a festival that takes place in a rural town in northern Sweden. Christian (Jack Reynor), Dani’s boyfriend, is going with a group of buddies, and because he is as incapable of breaking up with Dani as he is of being nice to her, he allows her to tag along. And that’s when the real story begins. A group of American friends go to spend the summer in Sweden. They want to experience a different culture. And they sure do.
Aster is very good at depicting the power games that occur between people, sometimes below the level of consciousness, always below the threshold of overt behavior. He also has a way of consistently surprising the viewer by finding his own way of doing things.
Early in their Swedish adventure, the young Americans take LSD and sit in the grass. The usual way of filming hallucinations is to make everything look wacky, as though through a funhouse mirror. Aster makes the hallucinations much more unsettling by filming them realistically.
For example, Dani looks down and sees that her hand is sprouting grass. If he added weird effects to that, we’d react by thinking, “Wow, that’s quite an hallucination.” Instead, by filming it realistically, we react as she reacts: That looks awful. This is disturbing. It’s disturbing that grass is growing out of hand, and it’s disturbing because it’s not, really, which means her vision can’t be trusted. It’s disturbing in every way.
Like most people in horror movies, the Americans here are really, really, really, really stupid, with the survival instincts of lemmings on hallucinogens. Finding themselves in a community of fanatics, who dress in white and wear garlands of flowers in their hair, it doesn’t occur to these visitors, until fairly late in the game, that they have stumbled into something a little more intense than a feast day in Little Italy. These cultists are deadly serious, and the visitors are utterly at their mercy, unable to leave without permission.
It’s a little bit difficult to talk about “Midsommar,” because all the good things about it aren’t tied to plot events, and all the bad things are.
What’s more, all the good parts are at the start of the movie, and all the bad parts are near the finish. So it would be easy to leave the wrong impression that this is basically a good film, with some little flaws here and there. It’s not. It’s worse. Here’s an example of scene that will give the flavor of the last 80 minutes or so of “Midsommar.” A man and woman in their seventies stand at the edge of a cliff. The woman spreads her arms, leaps and lands flat into a large boulder. The camera zooms in on a close-up of her dead, smashed-in face.
Then the man jumps, but he misses the boulder. His body is mangled, but he’s alive. So the community gets out the ceremonial mallet, and several of their company walk over and smash in the man’s face with it. Again, we see this in close-up. Aster is big into smashed faces. These aren’t the only two. So it’s that sort of thing. After an hour, there’s no doubt where “Midsommar” is going -- where it has to be going -- and it gets there with no surprises. In place of plot surprises, Aster tries surprising you with repulsive sights, hitting you unexpectedly with some new revolting close-up at regular intervals.
By then, “Midsommar” is gone. Worse, we realize it never was there. Aster never had a strong hand going in, just the ability to stretch a weak hand to the limit, through a combination of talent and bluff. That’s not enough.