Midsommar

2019 romantic comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A couple tries to save their relationship by traveling to a remote commune in Sweden with some friends. It goes great!

I've never experienced a break-up after a lengthy relationship, mostly because I knocked up the first woman who showed any interest in me and got married to somebody who is also too lazy to ever get a divorce. Therefore, I'm not entirely sure I connect with everything going on in this rom-com. Or maybe, more accurately, it's an unromantic comedy, a brand-new Ari Aster genre. Last year's Hereditary was a straight horror movie mixed in with family drama and all this pagan stuff. I expected this to be more of the same, a horror movie borrowing bits from The Wicker Man and other 70's moody, stylish horror classics.

It's not really a horror movie. It's too bright to be a horror movie, almost all of the scenes taking place under a relentless sun. There are things happening to the characters or things the characters witness that are deeply unsettling, and if you think about the movie from certain characters' perspectives, it definitely seems like they're in the middle of a horror movie. As with his first feature, Aster shows off this gift for creating this almost unbearable tension. He's so patient getting the characters from Point A to Point Crazytown, setting this pace that forces the audience to absorb all these details and develop all these questions. Midsommar burns slowly, a candle that lets out this funky but still beautiful fragrance, but then by the end, you notice that it's caught your face on fire.

Contributing to that pace are all these slowly unfurling extended shots filled with all this complicated choreography, sometimes involving animals. Aster and company built this commune from the ground up, and the odd-angled structures give this an almost expressionistic look. Inside those structures are these gorgeous paintings, and the whole thing just looks like a labor of love, all this mythological detail packed into nearly every square inch of wall in these buildings. The camera moves inside and around these structures in these extended shots, and it's just the kind of thing a guy like me eats up. Breathtaking. Music also contributes, a haunting score by somebody calling himself The Haxan Cloak. It all blends in this quietly psychedelic swirl, the sheer length of the thing (nearly 2 hours and 30 minutes!), the strange visuals, and stranger goings-on disorienting the viewer almost as much as it must have disoriented the unfortunate characters who are really trapped in this place.

Yes, this is a movie about a devastating break-up, the commune and its customs and ceremonies representing the rituals a couple in a collapsing relationship might undergo. However, I want to reiterate that the movie is very funny. It's a sneaky kind of funny, one where an audience in a theater might laugh just because it releases some tension a bit. But a lot of the times, I'm not sure how the actors and actresses playing the members of this community keep a straight face. They're good, but Florence Pugh is terrific. It's one of those performances where you think another actress could have played the part, but nobody could have done it quite like Pugh did. She's great!

Not everything adds up in this, and I'm not sure it would even after a rewatch or two. I'm curious about the following:

1) A female scream heard three times from multiple perspectives--I don't believe it was ever explained.
2) The significance of an early drug trip
3) The symbolism of the oracle's deformity
4) Why one character who winds up spending time with some chickens meets the particular graphic end he meets
5) The significance of grief in this movie
6) A bear--why?