With rose coloured glasses on how do you spot a red flag? This is a question that wracked my brain after revisiting director Ari Aster’s Midsommar.
A wild trip beyond the realm of shrooms. Midsommar is a film that not only is confusing but enthralling. Past the pubic hair pie, period blood love drinks, and ritual group sex. The world the viewer becomes entangled with is disorienting, maddening and could be a communal hallucination. However, I think most of us missed the point of the film. The consensus of the film’s appraisal is in its ending and the fact that it’s seemingly happy. And that just doesn’t sit right with me. In fact, it sits so wrongly with me that I had to stand and shout “how is this a happy ending” the second time I watched out of pure frustration.
Was I missing something? Since, I think we all watched the same horrific closing act? As cheesy as this statement will come across: the ending of Midsommar is us. And I want to explain why it is very much the most terrifying film of 2019.
A caveat: spoilers from this point onwards!
The plot is seemingly simple. Dani, our protagonist (played by Florence Pugh), is grieving after the death of her entire family. She travels with Christian, her boyfriend (Jack Reynor), and (his) friends to a commune in Sweden for Midsummer the festival. In between their increasingly straining relationship and Dani’s grief we get to know the personalities of their group. However, very quickly we realise it’s really a cult. The film follows Dani as she breaks up with Christian (in the most extreme way possible) and finds community and solace in the cult by the end.
It is the ability of the film engulfing you into the cult with open arms and absorbing you into the idyllic scenery (from which there is no escape) that horror is born. The wide-span shots that seem to drag your eyes through every valley and hill imaginable give a sense of breadth and never-ending freedom that the cult inspires. Western capitalism is constantly referred to as a horror itself for the Hårga and this integrates our own dissonance and dissatisfaction towards the capitalist model with the beauty of the cult. The opening literally confronts us with the idyllic imagery of the Scandinavian forest compared to western life with Dani’s blaring alarm clock dissecting the two shots.
Horror revolutionary and extraordinaire, Jordan Peele discussed Midsommar at length with Aster. In the months leading up to the film’s theatrical release, Esquire explored the film in comparison to Aster’s previous provocative work Hereditary. In an interview for the cover story of Fangoria reported on by Entertainment Weekly the two discuss the film. Peele says:
“I experienced it with this open-mouthed, wild-eyed gape. I think that part of how we get there is never reducing the villains to any kind of snarling monsters with an evil agenda.”
I don’t necessarily agree with the opinion Vox writer Alissa Wilkinson promoted in her commentary on the film:
“But in truth, the events in most of the film’s 140-minute runtime are fairly easy to follow; it’s in the ending where things get a little wild, grand, and possibly baffling.”
Though I can agree the confusing ending does seem to be Aster’s “signature move” I can’t say the same for the rest being “easy to follow”. Instead, I would suggest that what we’ve been following is not the truth but a very structured and deliberate framing of the fascism within the commune as soon as the group enter it. From the moment they pass through a banner greeting them into the commune — one that features an anti-immigrant slogan in bold, they have already been deceived. More importantly, so have we.
In some ways, the film offers a plethora of details the characters are unaware of. However, the dramatic irony of the film propels us to understand and sympathise the cult’s point of view. The point of view of the people who murdered every single person Dani entered the compound with. The same people who trap her into their sadistic and masochistic cult of white supremacy, seclusion, incest rituals, and suicide ceremony. The outside world is presented as scary and confusing to the safe-haven community of the Hårga. On the radio — the only outside communication we get once the group arrives, we hear a news segment on a Brussels man who has his penis bitten off in a car accident from receiving oral sex. The stark contrast of the outside to their community enables the fascism of the cult to be accepted and even welcomed. The cult is our friend, they are the people who guide us away from the degeneracy of modern capitalism through the traditions, customs and language of the joyous festival. The Hårga become our new reality, they structure the world we see and let us explore what they offer to us.
We justify the torment of Christian because we are looking at their relationship primarily through Dani’s point of view. Aster’s (self-titled) invention of a “toxic catharsis” for Dani at the end is much more volatile than even the director realises. We not only justify the element of what some would call an intense dose of ‘bad karma’ dealt out to Christian, in the form of drugging and sexual exploitation, but we find it cathartic for Dani. His debasement, public humiliation, and paralysis all contribute to a Freudian psychosexual delirium of his character journey. This rollercoaster of exploitation culminates in being paralysed and burned alive in a bear suit. He is unable to communicate or articulate his pain and suffering, housed in a claustrophobic, unfamiliar and phsyically alienated body like Dani metaphorically at the beginning with grief.
However, the cult manages to make us justify his and everyone else’s death as simply part of the their practices. This is most notable with Mark (played by Will Porter) who is presumed dead very soon after his arrogant, nonchalant behaviour peaks with him defacing a sacred tree. It’s not questioned, though we all have a kernel of the cult’s reasoning in our minds. We reason and and justify subconsciously that his death, and all the other’s, are deserved. Whenever Dani begins to poke behind the veil of the cult, her loneliness and grief are re-centred and focused on usually through a conversation with Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). Her isolation and vulnerability is their greatest asset to exploit. Not only do we justify their maintenance of racial purity, strict puritan gender roles, complete lack of privacy, a capitalist rubric of a never-ending labour force and mandated suicide. We believe Dani can start fresh here, and we want her to.
From the googly eyes and morphing mountains in the periphery of each shot and the intense zoom-in shots of characters directly looking at the camera (at us) in the centre. You find yourself leaning forward and backwards to compensate the dizzying and overwhelming cinematography. Midsommar is more than horror, it is a balancing act of both theme and perspective, reality and fantasy in all of their unknown and familiar confusion.
I think New Yorker writer Richard Brody was onto something, commenting, “under the rhetoric of pleasure, freedom, and the warmth of a virtual extended family, Aster finds bloody totalitarian mind control.” The general viewership of the film fell into the trap of wrapping up discourse after concluding it is an “ascension” film featuring a weird white cult.
Dani, now a victim of the cult’s psychological brainwashing, celebrates the death of her old life. We seen this as bright and colourful but everything around her is dead. The food, the flowers, the friends — they’re all gone. The cult manages to make us justify that urinating on a tree equals an un-sanctimonious murder. The western group of travellers may be incompetent and disrespectful but the very belief that “well they deserved it” is accepted logic by the cult, by Dani, and by viewers is horrifying.
This idea is not entirely new to me and neither is this take, but I do have additions to this antithetical reception that’s catching on. Video-essayist Kay and Skittles, explores in-depth the horrors of fascism in the world Ari Aster creates. From the “dark suffocating shots” of Dani’s world, we are ushered into the brilliant incandescent world of the Hårga with her. Despite the abusive gendered element of the cult that mirror real-life cults and their fascination with white supremacy. Midsommar does “groom” us like cult would its members (who are most likely to be women).
Naturally, since I’m black, the first unsettling thing I noticed once they arrived was the race dynamic. Watching the only two black characters outnumbered and engaging with an all-white, secluded, cult. I was apprehensive, to say the least. It felt like they were written to die, even before I heard them speak. It’s affirmed by connecting their deaths to the cult’s incestual practices for the group’s purity and creation of oracles. They recruit white members as fresh meat to stop the inbred demographic becoming the majority of the cult. Josh (played by William Jackson Harper), Aster says, is “thrown away in a way that the other members of the main cast are not. And that is because these people have no further use for him.” It is even more unnerving considering the bigoted dribble of the elder (played by Anki L), that I didn’t pay attention to first time round. The festivities of the Maypole are to spite “the Black One,” as noted by Truthdig writer Noor Al-Sibai.
The running joke of “black people aren’t in horror movies because we would’ve already run away” as a consensus of its own becomes more horrifying to think about as it has credence here. One of them did try to run. Though Simon (Archie Madekwe) tried to flee after disturbing the rituals of the cult and causing a scene, he, of course, did not get very far.
And then, it all starts to click. The connections to white supremacy venture further than the maltreatment of black and brown characters in the film. The exploitation and dehumanisation of black people in the mythical texts of the cult manifest genuine hatred for those who are not ethnically “pure”. You can’t even have a baby without permission, so there is a stringent focus on keeping out undesirable genetics. Sound familiar?
It is a sentiment shared by none other than the loudest elephant in the room; the Nazis. Of course, the imagery and strange folklore present throughout the film did not go unnoticed in inital commentary. The subtleties of white supremacy for example in the runic language the cult uses to create their sacred texts explicitly being linked to Nazis. Though it is ostensibly a “breakup movie” as Aster belligerently sticks to, the deliberate use of Nazi symbolism and associations of nationalism in the cult’s rhetoric, songs, and culture all expose a sinister underbelly in the subtext.
The parallels between Nazi ideology and Nordic mythos are frequent and formidable. Utilising God’s such as Odin, the daddy of the Nordic pantheon, feature as an emblematic symbol for groups such as Soldiers of Odin. The deliberate intermingling of neo-Nazi iconography and imagery is far beyond coincidental. I don’t think it necessarily is trying to problematise Swedish people and their cultural heritage as some very angry white people may think. The argument that Aster is hellbent on creating propaganda to slander the white man and paint the Swedes as anti-black, immigrant haters, is quite the stretch. Since the film goes to great lengths to personalise the cult members and their history, and that many are children who learn this way of life is the right way.
It reveals a common thread that when pulled, unravels the entire safety net of the ‘overcoming grief’ consensus. The cult members are victims of their own manufactured horror. The elders in close up shots show visual distress at the prospect of actually having to jump off a cliff to their death. They were raised to believe this is not only normal but divine and an act of taking back their control over mortality. They do decide when they die, but they also don’t.
Joule Zelman, writer for The Stranger recognises this when she says:
“While the Swedish cultists — who all learn a runic language as children — aren’t necessarily white supremacists, it’s not a stretch to view ‘Midsommar’ as a warning.”
The allure of the cult and its practices entice and pick away at the curiosity of Josh on the other hand. He photographs the archival works and sacred texts though specifically told not to. Both Josh and Simon are othered almost immediately compared to their white counterparts who are graciously accepted. However, this is to varying degrees. Josh (notably a dark-skinned black man) is the first one we can confirm dies because we see his body — well, part of it. Simon dies offscreen too as he is absent from a majority of the film after the death ceremony (called ättestupa) of the elders. After we see (what is presumably) Josh’s foot sticking out of a garden patch, Simon’s body is shown stuffed as a blood eagle. Both are made examples of for minor excursions though they seemingly were never welcome from the start.
The film chiefly allows us to take this voyeuristic look at both pain and love by exploring Dani’s displacement. We watch her trauma and the torment of those around her and believe we would never make the same mistakes. Or fall into the trappings of the horror genre. We could all fall into the arms of a cult, as they often present themselves as a saving grace. The film exacerbates this key fact by embellishing the life and vibrancy of the cult in its visuals. Courtesy of cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski creating a fantastically cataclysmic dreamworld in the Swedish countryside. The optic horror of Midsommar comes from the cinematography. Both the lighting and frame composition contribute to the jarring incongruity and add to the overall disallusionment created.
Another point to involve in our reflection of Midsommar is Dani’s fragility. The fragility of someone grieving and the horror of displacement and existentialism death brings. Fascism and the cult hold Dani’s hand through her trauma. However, her support system is illusory. It is fake. The cult merely provide a mentality that death can be controlled and that argument leads many to conclude the film is entirely about grief and its role in our chaotic lives and neuroses. Although, they do offer Dani a way to have control over death, they still kill people who become too old (at 72 nonetheless)! They still introduce children to the labour force when they are old enough to be breeders and workers in this pseudo-communist (but really capitalist) system of society.
Much to my newly realised horror, we have reframed the ending of Midsommar to be one of redemption and shedding of grief. The last shot shows Dani smiling. To me, this is the most horrifying part of the film. Midsommar contextualises Dani smiling as this sort of full-circle moment coming to terms with death. She is compassionate, calm and composed. She is… free, right? Her emotional and existential alienation dissolve when she becomes May Queen. Death is not so scary anymore like it was in the first minutes of the film and the murder-suicide of her family.
Unlike Dani, left in a perpetual state of waiting for the other shoe to drop — courtesy of Aster, we have a choice. This piece is not to simply say we must reject fascism. Of course! We must be privy to how it encroaches on our livelihoods by pretending to meet our immediate needs. The other side of the coin is consensus. It leads us to latch onto the first theory we can manage to stomach even if its as wild as muddy grass tea.
I’d like to make the point here that there is no singular villain in Midsommar either. Many of the cult actually celebrate this as a way to reach their own cathartic release and happiness. However, they are not entirely or inherently that way. Aster comments on this in an interview at a Mumbi film festival reported on by the HuffPost India:
“He [Pelle] is definitely the catalyst between his friends and their deaths. But it’s up to you to think how much of a villain he is and how honest he is being with [Dani].”
Though film criticism is a small microcosm of society, it is part of society. And, just like society, we have managed to ignore the biggest cult of all that exists— fascism. Our consensus to understand something we can’t even see is what limits our understanding of what we desperately need to escape from. Dani is not safe by the end, but we are no safer than she is. For many, this film is about the horrors of a bad relationship, but what about the volatile relationship we are all caught within. Even the staunchest advocates against fascism, which most of us are, have found ourselves engaging with it and in our reception of this film, we seem to agree with it. The horror of Midsommar is in what we can’t see. No one person is immune to the most volatile ideas human society has created, no one is immune to cults, no one is immune to fascism.
I’ll end this piece on another question, one I think perfectly encapsulates the detrimental horror Midsommar displays.
How do you get out of the hole when you don’t even know you’re in one?
The answer isn’t clear. At least this way, we are one step closer to unravelling Ari Aster’s puzzling masterpiece.
