‘Hereditary’ director offers frightening Swedish trip
In a movie world of bantamweight scares, designed primarily to get you to the next gotcha, writer-director Ari Aster is an outlier. He doubles down on really just making the audience, you know, eat it.
The first hour of Aster’s meticulously freaky new film, “Midsommar,”works as craftily and well as anything in “Hereditary,” his 2018 debut feature. Florence Pugh, the terrific English actress from “Lady Macbeth” and “Fighting With My Family,” runs this show as surely as Toni Collette took care of business in “Hereditary.” Like many of the releases handled by the distributor A24, Robert Eggers’ brilliant “The Witch” chief among them, “Midsommar” will enthrall some while dismaying, offending or boring others.
It’s not quite what it should be, or could’ve been. But it’s the work of a remarkable talent whose directorial eye, for now, is out ahead of his screenwriting instincts.
Aster’s prologue shows us a series of densely popular frescoes detailing ritualistic pagan dances and copulations, as a menacing sun oversees the activity. Then the two halves of the Bosch-like scene part, in the manner of a proscenium stage curtain.
The Swede, named Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), comes from a remote village four hours north of Stockholm. Every 90 years his village hosts a “crazy nine-day festival” ushering in the spirit of midsummer, while the sun never sets. “Midsommar” is a bright, sunshine-y tale of dread.
First, though, the dread is more immediately apparent as Aster establishes a grave starting point for his grief-haunted protagonist, Dani, played by Pugh. For months Dani has had minimal contact with her sister, whose mental health has been shaky. Dani’s boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), is a passive-aggressive mixed blessing at best. He has been edging away from the relationship for a while. His male friends — a vaping uglyAmerican lout played by Will Poulter, and a more sensitive academic specializing in European midsummer traditions, portrayed by William Jackson Harper — have been urging a breakup to no avail.
Christian doesn’t want the guilt of leaving an unhappy partner in the lurch any more than he wants to stay. When Pelle invites Christian and company to Sweden for six weeks, they accept. Dani, not in on the plans at first, reluctantly agrees to tag along.
Arriving in the land of the midnight sun and the copious mind-altering substances, this uneasy group acclimates to the best of their abilities. While the grad student played by Harper pursues his thesis, Christian decides he, too, wants to write about the strange customs particular to the village of their mutual friend Pelle, which is more like a commune.
As the underlying function of this earthy festival becomes clearer, “Midsommar” risks becoming a narrative inevitability. Aster’s influences include screenwriter Anthony Shaffer’s “The Wicker Man” (1973), and weird as it sounds, there’s a little “Brigadoon” in the mix.
The movie lacks surprises when it needs them most, in the final laps of the nine-day festival of regeneration. The violence and sexual material in “Midsommar” is quite explicit, and sometimes striking.
Pugh excels throughout. The movie works best, I think, as a black-comic treatise on what can befall a garden-variety passiveaggressive mixed blessing of a boyfriend if he’s not careful.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.