Encounters at the End of the World
Sometimes it's really a matter of engaging with a particular piece of art at precisely the right moment.
When I first saw Midsommar, it was a late-night screening just before flying off for a month-long trip to Europe (though not Scandinavia). My thoughts then were that it was quite good but not great; at times brilliant but a somewhat muddled follow-up to the superior Hereditary; excellent lead performance. On the whole, though, my mind was elsewhere –– planning for flights and train connections, re-confirming meetings and appointments, reminders-to-self not to forget passports, chargers, plug adaptors, etc. –- and I didn't think about it too much in the two years since.
Revisiting Midsommar now, I find it extraordinary and truly devastating in a way that few fiction films are. If it's less immediately, viscerally terrifying than Ari Aster's previous film, it's an altogether more accomplished, patient, and open work, and ultimately more insidiously disturbing; not flawless but more interesting for its apparent flaws. Hereditary is one of the best horror movies of this century. Midsommar is one of the greatest movies, period, so far this century. The former is far too intense and claustrophobic to live and breathe inside. The latter, longer and more deliberately paced, is decidedly uncomfortable but nonetheless possible to settle into.
I have always been drawn to and fascinated by art that captures something of the polar extremes of emotion, feeling, and experience: films ranging from Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc to Davies' A Quiet Passion; music like that of PJ Harvey, later Mount Eerie, some John Lennon; books like Augustine's Confessions, Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Midsommar, I recognize now, is very much such a work, and a first-rate example of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen both the feeling of overwhelming, life-altering trauma and the weird, half-there haze of life after it evoked more convincingly, and discomfitingly, than by Aster and Florence Pugh as Dani, Midsommar's grief-stricken protagonist.
Only partly successful as a horror movie (tellingly, it isn't really scored like one), Midsommar is a masterful, unflinchingly bold study in extremes: the bleak darkness of a deep-winter blizzard and the blinding radiance of the midnight sun in a cloudless sky; inconsolable sadness and fleeting, adrenalized ecstatic experience; cryptic, primordial folk ritual and the cold conventionality and cynicism of modern society; the tenuousness and uncertainty of life and the terror and violence of death; the feeling of being profoundly, hopelessly alone despite desperately reaching out for, and physically being around, other people; acute, sudden stabs of loneliness, anxiety, jealousy, heartbreak. When Dani spies her boyfriend engaged in a bizarre orgiastic ritual, she reacts first with sobbing and vomiting, then with guttural moans of pain –– recalling both her reaction to the unspeakable tragedy in the film's opening moments and the Hårgans' collective response to the old man's botched ättestupa.
Pugh's scowl-frown –– permanently downturned as if by a magnetic pull, sometimes just barely holding back tears, other times letting them flood out in torrents –– is the film's great, enduring image, thus making its contrasting final shot all the more beguiling and affecting.
