Even the most messed up Fairy Tales deserve a happy ending…

A Brief Ode to Scary Movies

I grew up watching scary movies. One of the first ones I remember watching was George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead with my dad before he went to work one day. He worked early, which means I was about 8 years old watching my first zombie movie ever around 4 AM. The genuine fear was so real, and as a kid the laughability of zombies would never enter my mind. My dad and I kept watching scary movies, Dawn of the Dead, Final Destination, and Saw jump out, and even though we enjoyed them all thoroughly (seriously if someone wants help writing Saw X: In Space I am here for it, I even wrote the tagline “cutting you from The Sun to Uranus) few of them made me feel like Night of the Living Dead did. As I got older, I became more aware of an underlying racial message Romero may have accidentally snuck into a zombie movie from 1968. The best scary movies scare you, but also have a message. Scream was the next movie to make me feel this way. Violent gore mixed with a meta movie commentary that becomes better upon rewatch. These intellectual layers are great, but when they can meet that feeling of childlike fear I still crave (because I’m clearly a weirdo) the movie becomes a near masterpiece. A few years ago, Get Out was able to hit these marks and my students and I had a blast getting into the symbolism of Jordan Peele’s Oscar Winning debut. Ari Aster’s Midsommar is the next great scary movie.

Midsommar A Review With Spoilers

In 2019, and really over the last few years, most movies are either: Superhero stories, sequels, or remakes. Midsommar is none of these things. As of right now, I have seen Midsommar three times in theaters. I have an extremely short list of movies I’ve seen that many times in the actual theater: Inception a masterful mind-melting dream heist movie, and The Hangover a comedy in which a four friends are mistakenly drugged during their bachelor party, and trying to find their missing friend on the day of his wedding. Midsommar is a breath of fresh air and is a beautifully shot amalgamation of Friday the 13th, The Sound of Music, and Waiting to Exhale. Now movie fans may be asking “how can one movie be like all 3 of those?” and it’s a fair question as those three movies have as much in common with each other as do the only three movies I’ve seen in theaters three or more times. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED STOP READING NOW! Ari Aster was able to tell a fairytale-like story of Dani, played by Florence Pugh, is a student getting her doctorate in psychology, who gets hit with one of the worst imaginable tragedies during the movies opening 10 minutes when she finds out her bipolar sister kills herself and their parents. Dani has no one left but her distant boyfriend Christian (played by Jack Reynor), who we previously see eating pizza with his stoned friends conversing on how to break up with her while joking about impregnating Swedish women on their upcoming trip (holy foreshadowing). Christian, along with the amazingly and handsomely named Josh, (played by The Good Place‘s William Jackson Harper) an erudite anthropology doctoral candidate writing his thesis on archaic surviving European midsummer traditions (my nerdometer is through the roof on that btw), Mark (Will Poulter of We’re the Millers and Bandersnatch), the token sarcastic american Horndog archetype, and Pelle (played by Vilhelm Blomgren) the kind, artistic, Swedish transplant, invite Dani to go on their trip to Harga, Pelle’s home, to see the titular festival. The gang, after taking a brief stop to ingest some hallucinogenics, follow the sound of sweet melodic recorders and walk into a village straight out the storybooks. We see man, nature, and architecture all living in beautiful harmony, and see a village so serene we can’t imagine anything going wrong (spoiler alert a lot goes wrong).

It’s once we arrive at Harga that we start seeing the three movies come together. From this point on, the movie is the brightest technicolor experience I have ever had in a “Horror” movie. The sun seemingly never sets. Everything is vibrant. The attestupa scene, while filled with cringe-inducing gore, is visually stunning. Christian’s role-reversing naked run (taking the place of a normal naked girl running in a slasher movie) ended with him seeing another traveller adorned with flowers in the Blood Eagle viking sacrifice. This movie looked like a Thomas Kinkade painting come to life while simultaneously forced people in the theater around me to cover their eyes at times. Ari Aster’s use of color subverts the violence in much of the same way of Quentin Tarantino’s musical cues. The flowery colorscape and brightness of the building is especially effective in juxtaposition with the climactic ending as Dani burns her cheating boyfriend alive, and it is at this point we see the connection to Waiting to Exhale. In this 90’s gem, modern queen Angela Bassett finally meets her breaking point when her husband leaves her (do I have to do a spoiler alert for a movie from 1995?) for a younger woman, Bassett responds by burning his clothing and car for catharsis. Dani, much like Angela Bassett’s Bernie (which is just awesome as she burns a car) is beaten down and broken by everything in her life, and this fire is the chance for a clean start with a new family.

5 More Reasons I’m Obsessed With Midsommar

1. Movies with Groups Rock: I do this thing when I watch movies where I try to see how my friends and I compare to the groups on screen. With Superbad my best friend Jeff and I were easy comps to Seth and Evan. My roommates in college would all argue about who was most like Phil from The Hangover, but we were all probably closer to Alan. Buzzfeed became a booming internet goliath due to quizzes to see which “Guardian of the Galaxy” you are, or “are you more Betty or Veronica”. What I really like about groups is the more social aspect of things. I always try to see how the group fits together, or figure out why they are friends. Doug was clearly the lynchpin of The Hangover friend group, (which is why it’s brilliant that he was the one missing) with how little Alan, Stu, and Phil have in common. The group in Midsommar is a classic construction. Christian and Dani are our couple on the rocks, perfect conflict creators. Christian, Pelle, Mark, and the handsomely-named Josh are anthropology doctoral students. We can see so well how this group has its roles. Mark is the horndog who just wants to have fun. Christian is in that relatable late 20’s age where you don’t know what you want to do. Josh is erudite and ambitious. Pelle is a foreigner acting as both the initial outsider within the group, but also the driving force for the movie’s plot. It all just fits so well, you can understand how this group functions, and it lends itself to furthering the plot. Perfectenshlagge.

2. The Support System

At the beginning of this movie, Dani has one of the most awful things to imagine happen to her when her sister kills herself and her parents. You hear her absolute anguish over the phone and we see her unsupportive boyfriend Christian, who was just talking with his friends about breaking up with her (friend group driving conflict), is distant and dismissive throughout the movie. By the end, Christian’s distance led to him cheating on Dani and absolutely breaking her. Now Christian apologists will blame a love spell or the copious amounts of drugs, but the result was the same, Dani had her heart broken. After Dani discovers this infidelity she is surrounded by her sisters from Harga who not only completely embrace her, but they scream, cry, and ache with her (see above). This sharing of emotions was a theme throughout the entire village, and it’s this moment that Dani officially picks her new family with a smile as she burns her boyfriend and others in a sacrifice to the old gods of Harga.

3. Closed Circle Storytelling:

I won’t belabour how great the bookends to this movie were, but they perfectly complemented each other. There were so many great small moments like this. Josh, who’s quest to learn as much as possible about Midsummer traditions of old Europe, was motivated to a fault by his brain, and he had his brain bashed in. Mark talked non-stop about sex, or pleasures of the flesh, and he was skinned. Pelle begins the movie as the fish out of water, by the end he’s comfortable and it’s his friends that are the ones in an alien place. Clearly this is appreciated more upon rewatch, but again, I’ve seen this three times in theater.

4. Foreshadowing:

Upon the 2nd and 3rd rewatches everything becomes apparent. The opening image (scroll back up to that creepy painting…notice how I write in closed circles as well) basically explains the way everything will unfold, with Pelle as the Pied Piper and Dani as the May Queen by herself. After a crass Mark joke about Christian impregnating a waitress, Pelle follows up with a “not to mention the girls in my village you can get pregnant.” Christian then ceremonially sleeps with a girl, in front of multiple other women (support system), seemingly impregnating her like Pelle joked. Pelle mentions, while consoling Dani and pulling her in deeper, his parents died when he was young “they were burned alive in a house”, and by the end of the movie we see people volunteer to be burnt alive in part of the village’s sacrificial ritual. A game is mentioned called “The Skinning of the Fool”, Mark and his jesterly ways end up with him skinned. This movie is on the level of “The Cask of Amontillado” with its foreshadowing, simply masterful.

5. Florence Pugh:

Let me make a few metaphors about how all in I am on Florence Pugh as an actor. If she were a stock, she’d be a sure fire blue chip you’d expect to pay out huge dividends. If she were in the NBA Draft, she’d go in the lottery. Comparing her to others, she’s going to be somewhere in between Scarlett Johansson and Chloe Grace Moretz. I think she’s going to be a huge star. I hope she’s in movies for years to come. I want to be on record with this prediction, her facial acting, her look, the level of emotional empathy she made me feel on screen was beyond awesome.

Everyone needs to see this movie, I’ll probably be there in the theater seeing it for the 4th, 5th, and 6th times.