Warning: a colossal number of spoilers ahead!
When I first watched Midsommar (dir. Ari Aster) in 2019, I think I went back to watch it another three times. I was totally engrossed by how it made me feel: disgusted by how exuberantly bright and floral the gore was and petrified by the hair-raising, jaw-dropping ending. My skin crawled at the notion of being paralyzed inside a disemboweled bear. I was sick and in love at the same time, driven mad by the coexistence of beauty and horror expertly placed within the film.
I was entranced by how layered it felt to me. Through every rewatch, I found something new I hadn’t noticed before. Witnessing the character of Dani on screen was like peering into a looking glass. As the Harga cult sunk their claws into her, preying on her vulnerability by killing her last thread to the real world, I could not help but cry when the credits began to roll. It was like I had been shot— targeted by a filmmaker that I had never known.
How had he dug into my soul and ripped the thoughts from my very mind? It was the only thing I could think about for weeks. I laid in bed, wide awake, my mind flushed with visions of sunflowers sewn into a victim’s eyes, charcoal smoke curling out of someone’s mouth instead of a guttural scream and the brains of an elderly man scattered amongst gray rock. The film painted my insides, intertwining itself in between my conscious and subconscious, haunting the times where I was alert and asleep.Â
The most jarring and accurate element of Midsommar is its portrayal of not grief, but desperation (I think that one belongs to its predecessor Hereditary, written and directed by the same man). The same kind of neediness or clinginess is buried within me, in the way that it has inhabited every person born before my time and after. The film takes me on a journey of incredible emotions. I am struck by grief when Dani’s family dies, hounded by isolation during her mourning and I heave and wail along with her at the spike of her boyfriend’s (Christian) betrayal. I am profoundly moved.
But for anyone who does not have a religious experience when watching (like me), what can be taken away from the film after initially digesting its abject terror is its unabashed humanity. There is something deeply empathetic and humanistic in the way it approaches the characters of Dani and Christian, as the film lives and revels in its ambiguity, refusing to be strictly tied down to “good” and “evil.” The motives of each constituent grows increasingly muddy as the film lurches on, asking the audience to challenge who the antagonists or protagonists are. Who is the villain? Is it Dani? Christian? The tourists? Or the village?
It provides a clairvoyant objectivity about feeling anger, hurt and grief. It sympathizes with Dani and her imperfections and weaknesses, and in a similar fashion, allows me to sympathize with mine. I encourage other witnesses to the film to weave the same lessons into their lives as well. To be human is not a crime— to need or grieve is not selfish. For young people, specifically 20-somethings, navigating desires, relationships and trauma come to an intersection that is situated in the chase for identities.
We are like everyone else in the film: we are uninspired grad students, thieves in hopes of capturing something that doesn’t belong to us, ignorant losers who unknowingly urinate on ancestral trees and codependent girlfriends who can’t let go of the last person in their lives, no matter how poorly they are being treated. Midsommar is perfectly imperfect, silver and clear, pointing fingers back at the audience.Â
Yet the film also acknowledges the inevitable subjectivity of the spectator, the narrative caving into what we have long been thirsting for: the operatic, climactic burning of it all. We are supplanted in the character of Dani, we are her real-life surrogate, hungry and snarling for this deserved vengeance. Truthfully, I admire any film that achieves the goal of being able to understand its patrons so well, but Midsommar is a specific example that follows me wherever I go. I watch it at least two to three times a year, chained to the screen that morphs itself into a mirror, and I am its willing victim.Â
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