Heart of darkness lurking in the land of the midnight sun
Midsommar (18) Verdict: Anything but sunny
WHEN I emerged, blinking in the July sunlight after almost two and a half hours watching Midsommar, Ari Aster’s deeply unsettling drama set mostly in a Swedish commune, it was all I could do not to cancel a long weekend I’d booked in Stockholm later this year.
Midsommar is that kind of film. Long after the closing credits scroll down the screen over the wryly-chosen Walker Brothers anthem The Sun Ain’t Going To Shine Any More, it lingers like a vague but troubling memory.
It is only Aster’s second feature as writer-director, but he already has form. His first, last year’s Hereditary, was a powerful supernatural horror movie with a stupendous lead performance from Toni Collette. Here, young British actress Florence Pugh, still only 23 but not so much a rising star as fully risen, is similarly fine. She plays Dani, an American psychology student coming to terms with a desperate personal tragedy that plays out even before the opening credits.
Dani is comforted by her boyfriend and fellow graduate student Christian (Jack Reynor), although it is soon apparent that he was about to chuck her before her world fell apart.
Aster toys with this dynamic throughout the movie. Their relationship — his selfishness, her neediness — roots us in reality, which is a good idea, because soon enough Dani and Christian enter a world where nothing is quite as it seems. Aster
also keeps an undercurrent of humour flowing, which further enhances Midsommar; after all, laughter warms an audience, intensifying the chill when things go wrong. The strongest conduit for the comedy is Mark (Will Poulter), one of Christian’s college pals and the least sympathetic to his romance with Dani.
When Christian invites her on a boys’ trip to Sweden, Mark, who has been wondering if they should visit any, ‘like, meatball sex clubs’ while passing through Stockholm, is duly horrified.
There is a purpose to the trip; another of the group, Josh (William Jackson Harper) wants to submit a thesis about European summersolstice festivals. Handily, their good friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), grew up on a commune in northern Sweden, which is about to hold a nine-day celebration that takes place every 90 years. So off they all go, to the land of the midnight sun.
With his cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski, Aster subverts the horror-film standard of darkness bringing out the demons. In this sun-lit commune, everyone wears white.
To the four visiting Americans, plus a couple of young Brits, they extend the warmest welcome. Their ancient pagan traditions (making the name Christian all the more ill-fitting) seem quirky rather than sinister.
But insidiously, and finally shockingly, the sect’s preoccupation with fertility and the human life cycle is revealed as something else, a ritualised form of suicide and murder.
Aster resists the kind of jump-scares on which most horror films rely. Is Midsommar even a horror film?
Whatever, it owes a great deal to Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror classic The Wicker Man, so much so it’s a surprise not to find Britt Ekland — who gave her all (and showed it) in The Wicker Man — cast as one of the creepy Swedish elders. It would have been a neat in-joke.
Still, Aster makes his own rules, and superbly manages the creeping sense of menace. Even at 147 minutes, Midsommar, unlike its hapless protagonists, never outstays its welcome.