Aaron's Thoughts
At its core, Midsommar may seem like a story portrayed many times on the big screen. You’ve seen it before. A person “comes of age” by shedding someone important from their life, discovering their found family, and maybe even finding themselves along the way.
In the simplest of terms, a breakup movie.
Yet, Ari Aster does what only Ari Aster could do. He decides to take a common story beat and set it to the backdrop of none other than a Swedish death cult. That’s right. A cliff jumping, field frolicking, love spell casting death cult. One that he meticulously researches & spends significant runtime exploring. You become so ultra fixated on the rules of the colony, how they operate, and how they fit into the broader world that it wouldn’t be hard to lose sight of the central play.
It’s that tension between portraying this pageantry of the colony & portraying the humanity of Dani that makes Midsommar so special. The tension between Scandinavian socialism and American capitalism. The tension between community and isolation. If Aster goes all in on scientific spectacle or human drama, it becomes a completely different movie.
There are so many details and so much craft behind what Aster puts on screen in Midsommar that it’s inevitably going to take a few watches for everything to stick. Repeat watches are not only rewarded, but required to see the whole thing for what it is.
This time around I was drawn to how similar the inciting incident in act one is to the one in act three. Both are traumatic experiences that will alter the course of Dani’s life (losing her family & catching her boyfriend cheating on her). Both are immediately followed by a scene of her weeping uncontrollably. And what’s fascinating is not the inevitable pain & grief that comes after moments like that, but the question of who is around you to hold you are in that state? Do they want to be there? Do they feel your pain so deeply that they can’t help but scream with you? Or are they simply holding you because they know they have to out of obligation?
It’s all handled so masterfully by Aster. Seeing it on a big screen was out of this world. Chills during the opening. Chills when the opening credits hit. Chills when the boisterous score is booming during the final act. Chills when we see Dani smile.
Chills all around. What a night. What a movie. What a filmmaker!
