Midsommar is a fantastically unnerving folk-horror reverie, brilliantly
conceived by writer-director Ari Aster who made last year’s horror hit, Hereditary. (Review by Patrick Compton -
9/10)
Whatever you think of this extraordinary
movie, you will surely accept that you haven’t seen anything quite like it
before.
Set in Sweden in mid-summer, when the sun
is ever-present, this is about a bunch of American students – some of them
budding anthropologists – who visit an ancient commune where they hope to fill
their boots with original material for their research.
The main character is the traumatised Dani
(Florence Pugh of Lady Macbeth fame)
who is barely hanging on to her passive-aggressive boyfriend Christian (Jack
Raynor) who has held back from ditching her because of her recent family
tragedy.
The movie is largely concerned with what
happens to the young Americans when they get to the commune. Nothing I write
will quite explain the sense of alienation and shock that the youngsters feel
as they begin to experience what happens to them as the commune’s members
celebrate a festival that takes place every 90 years.
Initially, the beatific residents, with
their Maypoles, muslin gowns and flower crowns, seem like a copy of a 1960s
hippy commune, but this impression is swiftly dispelled as Woodstock
flower-power turns to Charles Manson madness.
Or does it? This is not a horror film in
the clichéd sense, but rather the almost stately unravelling of a waking
nightmare in the harsh glare of the Swedish sun.
One of the movie’s extraordinary gifts is
that, amidst the horror, there is also a sardonic humour and a sense that,
after all, the commune has a way of living that makes as much or more sense
than the industrial West’s way of doing things.
This is a film that refuses to tick boxes
or offer itself up for easy analysis; each viewer will come away with his or
her own interpretation.
Writer-director Aster is a huge talent, a
kind of visionary, and Midsommar has
all the characteristics of a great film that makes you question the way you
live in a society whose norms are instinctively accepted but not analysed.
Love it or hate it, you will live with Midsommar’s seductive and disturbing
images in your skull for a long time to come, not least the final shot, in
which a key character’s face changes from that of a rictus of anguish to a beam
of pure joy.
Midsommar is showing at Gateway. - Patrick Compton
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