Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) (Patreon)

Much to my surprise, I ended up quite liking Midsommar. I don't want to give too much credence to this dodgy "elevated horror" concept, but I think it's worth noting the things that Aster does right in terms of audience identification. With the prologue, involving not only Dani (Florence Pugh) and her family, but the insensitivity of Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends, Midsommar clarifies the emotional terms that the rest of the film will be playing with. They are dudes, he is a creep who gaslights her into thinking everything is her fault, and she needs to find somewhere to belong.

Also, Aster realizes that in today's environment, the scary anthropological Other cannot be "foreign" in the conventional sense, so he creates an insular group of white cultists who serve pretty much the same function. As a community, they are fairly unpredictable, at least in terms of the specifics. Yes, this films owes a great deal to The Wicker Man, but nine out of ten horror films seem to owe that debt these days.

What's more impressive than the plotting of Midsommar is its direction and control over tone. It's not just that Aster has the otherworldly, Kubrickian camera glides down, that way of turning the landscape into an unfurling scroll of menace. No, the main achievement here has more in common with, say, Eli Roth's two Hostel films, if Roth were more of a formalist than a showman. Midsommar creates an all-enveloping atmosphere that subverts "normal" behavior. Soon, the glassy, overly orchestrated maneuvers of the Hårga come to seem much less intrusive and vulgar than Mark (Will Poulter) pissing on the sacred tree, or Josh (William Jackson Harper) snapping photos of the holy book after being expressly forbidden not to. More than this, the Americans' and Brits' whole affect is obtrusive and immodest, as if they have stumbled into a freakshow being mounted just for them.

Granted, the cult is big on pageantry, and Aster's use of blocking and mise-en-scene has echoes of Sergei Paradjanov's tableau-based cinema, or to a much lesser extent, Matthew Barney's field maneuvers. But Midsommar's primary perspective on this display is that it has a very different meaning from the inside, when the worshiper is one small part of a community rite. Dani emerges not only as the "final girl" but as the May Queen primarily because, instead of parading through the commune with a sense of entitlement, she evinces the humility of deep hurt. Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) knew of her loss and shared it, so perhaps the Hårga are a community that replicates itself not through initiation but on the basis of primal longing. As we see at several points in the film, when one feels agony, it is broadcast out to the entire group. For better or worse, Dani will never be alone again.