Review: Midsommar Is a Bold Sophomore Feature from the Director of Hereditary
If 2018s Hereditary, written and directed by the thrilling new filmmaker Ari Aster, was about the re..
If 2018s Hereditary, written and directed by the thrilling new filmmaker Ari Aster, was about the repellant nature of grief—its squalor and ugliness—then Asters sophomore film, Midsommar, is about the allowance that comes after that. But this film, out July 3, is no relieving balm. Instead, it finds the washed-out horror of what follows primary pain—the danger we might seek, court, and need when all the trappings of our life have been undone by unimaginable loss. Somehow, Asters deliberate and ponderous film is also really funny, as much a musing on the absurdity of our fragility as it is a scared lament.
In the films bravura opening sequence, playing before the introductory credits have rolled, we watch as mundane turmoil gives way to operatic trauma. The beguiling actress Florence Pugh plays Dani, a nervous and addled young woman fretting about a perhaps more addled sister. Dani worries shes a burden to her boyfriend, Christian (played as a thoughtless teddy bear by Jack Reynor), and shes right to. Shes dependent for a reason, and yet the support she demands is such a nuisance. Aster deftly, gut-wrenchingly depicts both sides of this common conflict, all the flailing uselessness of Christians comfort and all the embarrassment of Danis need.
What follows the openings hideous reveal grows ever more surreal, as Dani and Christian head to Sweden for a religious rite in a closed-off rural community to be observed by Christian and his anthropology grad student pals (Will Poulter and William Jackson Harper) as the guest of a shifty colleague. Dani tags along because she doesnt want to be left behind, a social awkwardness piercingly communicated by cast and script. But shes also there because shes so hungry for any sense of shape, of definition. Who wouldnt, in the staggering wake of a tragedy like Danis, push themselves into the unknown, into some otherworldly event, into an experience so foreign to ones own in search of higher truth?
Thats the gnawing wish that Aster almost cruelly makes manifest in Midsommar, teasing and yet sympathetic to the desire to find meaning from strange outlets. Pugh is extraordinary as she delineates Danis warring impulses, between the animal ache and the pragmatic person who still remains. Her performance is a fine companion piece to Toni Collettes in Hereditary: breakneck and yet measured, a comedy of human foible and messy impulse. As the film descends into its dreamy, psychotropic, brutal reverie, Pughs role becomes less sharply focused than Collettes. But still, theres that howling force, bursting out of the film like a scream, like a knife.
Aster offsets all that emotional churn with a wickedly serene physics, his images splayed out in a milky haze, sun-drenched and shining with ominous portent. Midsommar is a shocking piece of filmmaking—unnervingly competent even when the film yaws into silliness, even when it risks tedium. This film will alienate a lot of people (much like Hereditary, its audience exit polling is likely going to be abysmal), but theres a wonderfully audacious confidence to the way Midsommar is built. Its mannered style and sureness of theme, if not always execution, rattles you like a shake to the shoulders. Aster is prodding at a lot of things here, and though he binds you with all the movies soporific weight, he wants you to stay alert and listen.
While introducing the film before Tuesday nights screening at Brooklyns Alamo Drafthouse, Aster said he wrote the film after a breakup. You can see the skeletal outline of that process—all the guilty, ashamed postmortem assessing of what you might have done to a person to push them away, and what they might have done to fail you.
Yet I think the movie merits an even deeper read than that. Read More – Source
