Movie Reaction: Midsommar

Formula: Hereditary ^ Wicker Man

Ari Aster came out of the gates strong with last year's Hereditary. It was a stylized horror movie with several WTF moments and featured a really stellar lead performance from Toni Collete. People even tried to convince themselves it could net her an Oscar nomination*. That was a movie that couldn't quite live up to the hype for me. It left me cold in a way that wasn't intended. I loved the skill of the filmmaking though and was excited for whatever director Ari Aster followed it up with. Much to my delight, he stuck with horror while going in a very different direction, upping the difficulty with the sun-drenched pagan unease of Midsommar.

*Yes, her only Oscar nomination to date was for another horror movie (The Sixth Sense), but I've learned to never be optimistic about the Academy giving horror any respect.

Already, I'm starting to notice some patterns in Aster's work. Like Hereditary, Midsommar focuses on a female lead whose life if upended by a horrible tragedy. In this case, it's Florence Pugh's Dani. After her life is upended by her bipolar sister, she tags along with her boyfriend and his friends on a trip to Sweden to study a midsommar celebration. It's not as random as it sounds though. One of the friends (Vilhelm Blomgren) is from that village. Her boyfriend (Jack Reynor) and one of the other friends (William Jackson Harper) are grad students in the Anthropology department studying this exact thing. So, it's still sort of weird, but it's not completely random. They go to this festival in north Sweden. It starts off super bizarre in an endearing way. Everything is super-well lit. Since it's the land of the midnight sun, it's almost never dark, no matter how late it gets. Before long, well...you've seen  a horror movie before. You don't need me to tell you where this is going.

As I mentioned though: Ari Aster's patterns. He likes featuring a female lead with a brilliantly expressive face. The movie is very patient and deliberate. Aster opts for long scenes with minimal cuts. He often shoots scenes from a distance. There were several actors I thought I recognized, but it took 1-2 hours to get a close enough shot of them to be sure. Midsommar is low on jump scares, although it has several WTF moments. I had to look away from the screen a half dozen times. It's really impressive how much control Aster has over the tone. Even when I wasn't sure what exactly was happening, I never questioned if anything belonged in the movie. Midosmmar is darkly funny . This movie is filled with nervous laughter beats. It's the only horror movie I can think of that was scarier the more it made the audience laugh.

Florence Pugh, as I've said before, is my latest British obsession. She's so fucking good in this. She's a big ball of emotion, who gives most of her performance through the look on her face. Jack Reynor is an all-time great bad boyfriend, partly because of how often he thinks he's being a nice guy. Will Poulter is completely unneeded but thoroughly enjoyable as one of the friends. William Jackson Harper is too similar to his character Chidi in The Good Place for me not to get distracted by that in Midsommar. I don't know any of the Swedish actors. They all left me deeply unsettled, so mission accomplished. It's really Pugh who carries the movie, even though no one is bad in it.

This is perhaps a movie that I appreciate more than I like. I knew going in that it was the kind of movie in which people would ignore a whole lot of warning signs, so that didn't bother me as much as it does in most horror movies. It wasn't a selling point though. It was missing a beat or two in showing Pugh's character's emotional journey. I don't have an issue with how it ends things with her. I just think it skipped a step along the way. I really felt the length of the movie. It's 2h20m. Horror is optimal when it's shorter. It just is. It's a Catch 22 with Midsommar though. I like how patient it was with all the long, deliberately paced scenes, but that did leave the movie 30 minutes longer than it needed to be. There are a number of side-stories that go nowhere, like Reynor and Harper's argument over the topics of their doctoral theses. Frankly, Harper and Poulter could've been cut entirely from the movie with no significant impact on the story.

Still, this is the best horror movie I'm going to get for the next several months. I can't wait to see what Ari Aster makes next. Hopefully, he continues to look for scary stories that are off-kilter like this one.

Verdict: Weakly Recommend