Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper, Will Poulter, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Henrik Norlén, Gunnel Fred, Isabelle Grill. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Henrik Svenson. Film editing: Lucian Johnston. Music: The Haxan Cloak.
Too many makers of films and TV series -- I'm thinking of a particular example, HBO's series The Outsider -- seem to think that scary things happen only in the dark. I'm getting a little tired of squinting these old eyes at bad things happening in the murk on the screen. Ari Aster seems to know what I'm talking about: that weirdness happens in sunlight, too. Though Midsommar begins in gloomycam darkness, including the terrible thing that marks the life of Florence Pugh's character, Dani, a university student majoring in psychology, the film switches refreshingly to the open air and sunlight of Sweden in midsummer, when the sun never really sets. But of course this is where the really weird things happen. Midsommar was a solid commercial and critical success, even though it's really based on an old trope: people too smart for their own good fall foul of ancient rituals and practices. The American grad students who accompany Dani, still suffering from the event that wiped out her family, are a brainy but naïve lot: Dani's somewhat distant boyfriend, Christian (Jack Raynor), his fellow grad student in cultural anthropology, Josh (William Jackson Harper), and their friend Mark (Will Poulter). They have been invited by their Swedish friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), to see the midsummer rituals in his home community. It's clear that Dani and Christian are having relationship problems after the trauma of her recent loss, and it's also clear that Pelle is more than a little attracted to Dani. All of this will work itself out over the course of their visit to Sweden. Yes, horrible things will happen -- it's a horror movie, after all. But the film is made more creepy than startling by the sunny context. Even though they may manifest themselves in blood and pain, the real horrors in life are internal ones, Aster seems to be suggesting. As a director of horror movies, he has more in common with Ingmar Bergman than with schockmeisters like Eli Roth.
