Midsommar, written and directed by Ari Aster - 8.8 out of 10

Midsommar, written and directed by Ari Aster

8.8 out of 10

How on earth did I know that the elder people would jump off that cliff and hence I anticipated the peculiarness of this feature?

There are, as always, a few ways to approach this film and its content…either following the positive paradigm – ‘be a merit finder, not a fault finder’ or ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ Shakespeare – or indulging in criticism of the various shortcomings of the motion picture, which may not abound, but believe me, you can find them.

First off, it seems rather odd and rather ineffective to prolong the plunge into the substance of the film, which lies with the Swedish cult and its outlandish, cruel, autarchic, primeval rituals, with a long, even tedious segment in America, where the group of young people have an awkward dynamic and finally – it looked like it would never happen – decide to travel to this strange place in Europe…

Dani, her somewhat unhappy with their bond boyfriend, Christian, and his friends, Josh, Mark and Pelle decide to take a trip to the place where Pelle was born, in Sweden and spend time in the community there, after some back and forth, hesitations caused by the fact that the men would not want Dani to come along, but she does.

The natives seem friendly enough, when they arrive, and their attire appears innocent enough, with white dresses with traditional motives, a temple with naïve paintings on the wall, instead of the icons we see in other places of worship on the old continent, and some really bizarre decorations and art forms, with one showing the sexual organs of a woman and some peculiar operation that takes place there…

It is a slow introduction to what becomes a horror film and the question asked at the start may have an easy answer, for all viewers might have expected some horrible thing to happen – especially if they had looked up the genre of the film, which I did not – after this segment where we see that the Swedish members of this cult seem friendly, but they have some outlandish answers to almost all the questions asked.

Pelle is the one introducing the guests – and we would later learn that he had been actually on a mission and he brought the Americans to the camp with a definite, nefarious purpose -and explaining some of the traditions, the habits they have in the group, where spring is the period up to 18, followed by summer, until the person reaches 36, then we have autumn, finished at 54 and finally winter, between the ages of 54 and 72…what happens after that?

It is the end!

And that is the start of the gruesome, ghastly part of the film, where we have  the ceremony in which and elder couple, presumably out of winter and ready for the next stage, climb on top of two cliffs, watched from below by the whole assembly of children, women and men and then they jump to a terrifying death in the case of the woman and to an agonizing crash, in which one leg is severed and the man is conscious, up to the moment when his kind friends come with something like a huge hammer and bash his head in…the special effects are good and we are shown in quite a few scenes remarkable imagery of skulls crushing, brains coming out, entrails and other resplendent pictures.

We could pause here and state that reading Influence by Robert Cialdini or other psychological classics would help understand some of what is going on in the film, for we have had in real life tragedies that resemble Midsommar, one mass suicide that took place in Guyana for instance, is explained in the book using the Principles of Conformity and Reciprocity…people tend to imitate what others do, especially when they are in situations that are extreme, there is also the Principle of Respect for Authority and here they look at the elders to see what they have to do…

From the moment when the older couple dies and it is explained that they wanted it, they all do the same when their time comes and the guests are first horrified – or are they really? – but then try to use this Communicating Across Cultures bulshit, wherein they start accepting that this is a different thinking, ‘they also feel that taking old people to homes and leave them there to vegetate is inhumane…’ and finding excuses for something which absolutely monstrous and unacceptable…

Furthermore, Josh had known that he wants to have a thesis on what is going on here, taking notes throughout, but then the undecided Christian wants to do about the same and a dispute ensues between the two, when they should have been on the same side and both – actually all – needed to face the cruelty, abjectness of the event wherein a large group of people condone suicide, which arguably could be seen as premeditated murder, for the man and woman might have had no option but to surrender to the will of the mad ‘friends and relatives’.

Just like other fanatics, The Manson Family, the Reverend Moon and other mad religious leaders, the cult in Midsommar have a series of awful traditions, which include inbreeding, to produce a descendant that has some special capabilities, having sex with partners assigned based on astrology, coitus in the presence of a dancing group of women, old and apparently young, that dance when intercourse take place, come to the man involved in the act and push his behind, sing some outré, rather unstimulating, hoarse chants and the list is much longer.

Worst of all, they kill human beings – and the poor bear that had been kept in a small cage, for animal or human rights have not reached this remote place in the north – and they call it sacrifice, but then Australopithecus may have used some similar term…