Midsommar (2019)

I was surprised when I noticed the runtime for Midsommar went well north of two hours, but even so I'm sorry now I missed it in the theater (not least because sometimes I wonder if we will ever again have movie theaters). Director and screenwriter Ari Aster's previous picture, Hereditary, was also over two hours. That led me tangentially to a massive list on IMDb of 28,971 horror movies organized by runtime, which blew my thought that Aster was doing anything unusual. Midsommar (148 minutes) ranks #145 on that list, behind such notables as the 2018 Suspiria remake (152 minutes), The Wailing (2016, 156 minutes), Kwaidan (1964, 183 minutes in some alternate version), and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse (2007, 191 minutes). The last two are really more like assemblies of smaller pieces (if you can even call Grindhouse horror), and in many ways that's what Aster has done with both Midsommar and Hereditary, even though they have larger narrative through-lines and overarching visions. For Midsommar that's mostly the monotonous ups and downs of a bad 20something relationship going nowhere. I believe the monotony is as intended, and if you want to take the movie as a comedy, which is possible, that's the place to focus. A lot of people compare Midsommar to the original 1973 Wicker Man and that's certainly apt. Both make conscious use of daytime horror motifs. Midsommar mostly takes place in northern Sweden in late June, where full daylight goes some 22 hours, and then the two-hour night is merely dusk. But Midsommar is also like The Wicker Man by rooting itself in the late 19th-century horror sensation of paganism, with woodsy tales of goat-gods, elaborate, savage, and beautiful rituals, and the brawny mysteries of Nature flickering at the edges of sentience. My favorite parts of Midsommar reminded me of the churning inscrutable secrets of Arthur Machen's long story, "The White People." The rituals are strange, glimpsed in fragments, but they burst with vitality and mesmerizing power, even at their most heinous. Understanding is simply not necessary. Strangers objecting only highlight how puny the modern world is in this place of perpetual sun. Midsommar never loses track of its modern setting and the youth driving it, with smartphones, laptops, and social media, grinding economic anxiety, casual drug use, fraught sex. Even within all the pageantry the tormented relationship of Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor mimicking Seth Rogen) slogs on, like the necessity of dragging a corpse a long way to bury it. It's hard to choose who to like less between them but Christian ("Christian") is more the rat. The best part of the movie is of course the nine-day Midsommar celebration, which is wonderfully detailed, a kind of Burning Man festival staged by Led Zeppelin roadies and groupies, heralded by a drug trip and soundtracked by folkies in white robes playing traditional druidic fare. It's all cheerfully pagan and then it's shockingly brutal and then it's time for another feast. I loved it. There's some explanation about a cult and their various ways and beliefs, which is just enough to make the extraordinary events believable, as we have been softened already by witnessing the things we witness. You'll never look at springtime rituals such as a Maypole dance quite the same way again.