Overlong, but it makes a lasting impact with its brightly lit feast of horrors and striking imagery.
From fan favorite A24 and the madman behind 2018’s Hereditary, Ari Aster, comes the daylit slow burn of this Summer’s, Midsommar. Led by a few of this generation’s up and comers Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, and Will Poulter, they all prove their worth in this darkly comedic thriller that pulls no punches.
After unsettling audiences by delivering a contemporary horror film that dove deep into the recesses of generational terror, Ari Aster is taking audiences overseas to Sweden. Taking part in a 90 year tradition for a nine day feast where the sun never sets. Aster patiently eases into the primary setting of the movie and he keeps his foot pressed on your throat for the remainder of the film. For all of it’s technical masterwork, a year’s best Florence Pugh, and Ari Aster going “Full Aster”, I still feel as if there was a lot left to be desired in Midsommar.
It took me a while to see Hereditary because I don’t do too well with “In-House Contemporary Horror”, but I finally gave it the time and I ended up falling in love with it. Shortly after last year’s June release of Hereditary, Aster’s next project, Midsommar was quickly announced and anticipation revved up quicker than you could say the word, “cult”. It’s no secret that Aster was going through a bad breakup during this film’s inception, and you feel a lot of his frustrations boiling throughout the movie. Even if it isn’t spoken, it’s very much seen and felt.
A lot of this movie is generally a lot of downtime dedicated to scanning the sunlit horizons, fields, and buildings with characters in complete disarray. That sounds boring, but it adds to a never-ending sense of impending dread. The movie has multiple big moments of shock, but they’re intricately placed at the right moment to make the pay-off deeply rewarding and ultimately terrifying. All of these moments leave deep indents of extreme, gut-wrenching imagery that violently disturb the mind and make for some of the year’s most unforgettable sequences.
Although the character work could use some tune-ups through a tighter draft of the script, all of the actors sell this uniformed terror with genuine fear and palpable tears. As mentioned previously, Pugh is virtually inhuman in a breakout role that will surely get her in plenty of future projects. Jack Reynor has shown immense progress since 2014’s Age of Extinction and has found himself a solid career with smaller, more confined projects.
Overall, this film is definitely admirable, deeply terrifying, and a slow crackle under the flares of the sun, but a part of me feels as if this never reached its full potential. Most of the time I generally defend longer films and feel as if they get an overly bad reputation amongst the film community as of late. This is one of those instances where I feel as if this could be nearly cut in half. Maybe the impending sense of dread and slow crackle wouldn’t be as effective as Aster envisioned, but there never seemed to be enough story to warrant it’s lengthy runtime. There’s a lot of information, but it never feels deliberate or invested enough into exploring a lot of meaning behind it. Now, I’m not asking for exposition dumps or explicit imagery spelling it out to us as if we were first graders, but a little more depth to the mystery would have been nice. There’s a few elements that result in revelations or death, but it never feels consistent. It feels too brief, cut short, and it results in aimless conjecture on our part for most of the film.
Despite some head-scratching frustrations and lack of compelling enough information to warrant a lot of its third act hysteria, Midsommar is still a worthwhile and gut-wrenching experience that was promised. It isn’t “scary” by definition, nor does it need to be, but it is endlessly disturbing and it implants unrelenting images into the darkest recesses of our mind. Completely incapable of processing how any human could have an eye for realizing such horror. It’s commentary on release from trauma, the grips of toxic relationships and gaslighting being dismantled by the hands and eye of Ari Aster is all present and semi-satisfying. Although this could have done with a more concise vision and a less self-indulgent demeanor, Midsommar is still a lasting and deeply troubling motion picture that’ll make you gaze up at the sun and wonder how something so beautiful and bright could be so terrifying.
Midsommar gets a 73/100