‘MIDSOMMAR’ IS NO DREAM
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.
Perhaps, this: Ari Aster, who also made “Hereditary,” 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: She 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.
“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.
Aster is very good at depicting the power games that occur between people, sometimes below the level of consciousness.
Like most people in horror movies, the Americans here are really, really, really, really stupid, with the survival instincts of lemmings on hallucinogens. As they find 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.
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.
Here’s an example of scene that will give the flavor of the last 80 minutes or so. A man and woman in their 70s 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.
After an hour, there’s no doubt where “Midsommar” is going and it gets there with no surprises. In place of plot surprises, Aster tries surprising you with repulsive sights.
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.