Midsommar

A breakup film with a body count

Aster has said Midsommar is a breakup film and he is not being coy. Everything structurally important happens between Dani and Christian, and the cult is the mechanism that resolves it. The opening twenty minutes are the best thing in the film and have no horror in them at all: a woman's catastrophic loss, and a boyfriend on the phone performing concern to a friend who is telling him to end it. Florence Pugh's single held sob in Christian's arms, with the camera on her and his face going slack over her shoulder, is the whole film.

Then they go to Sweden, and the film tells you what it is going to do, and does it, slowly, in daylight, for two hours.

The daylight is the formal idea

Horror in the dark is a solved problem. Midsommar removes the dark. Nothing hides, nothing jumps, nobody sees less than you do — the sun does not set, the camera has nowhere to put a shadow, and the dread has to come from composition and anticipation instead. Pawel Pogorzelski shoots the meadow flat and bright and lets the tapestries on the wall tell you the plot before it happens.

That choice is the film's real achievement and also its cost. Shown everything in advance, you spend much of the runtime waiting, and whether that reads as mounting inevitability or as a long wait for a bad outcome you already guessed is the single biggest predictor of whether somebody loves this film or finds it a slog.

It is funnier and crueller than its reputation

Midsommar is a comedy about tourists. Mark pissing on an ancestral tree, Josh trying to get a dissertation out of people who are planning to kill him, Christian accepting a thesis topic that belongs to his friend — these men are not victims of a cult so much as of their own incuriosity. The film finds this very funny, and the laughter is what makes the ättestupa land: a sequence played with total ritual dignity by the Hårga and total horror by the visitors, and the film does not flinch from either reading.

Where it is weaker than Hereditary is in its people. The Hårga have no interiority at all — they are a beautifully designed delivery system. The three men are written thin enough that their deaths are satisfying rather than frightening, which drains tension from an entire act. Only Dani is fully alive, and the film is only fully alive when she is on screen.

The ending is the argument

What makes Midsommar genuinely unusual is that its climax is, for its protagonist, good news. She has lost her family, she has a boyfriend who treats her as an obligation, and she is handed a crown, a role and a community that has been engineered to welcome her. Aster's trick is to make that liberation legible and leave you to decide what it cost. There is no scene of Dani realising she has made a mistake. There is only the smile.

If you want the same director with the comfort of darkness and an explanation, Hereditary is on the shelf. This one keeps the lights on and makes you decide for yourself.

The short answer: Dani, newly crowned May Queen, is given the right to choose the ninth and final sacrifice — Christian or a Hårgan volunteer. She chooses Christian. He is sewn into the carcass of a bear and burned alive in the ritual temple with the other bodies, and the film's last image is Dani watching it burn and beginning to smile.

Here is how the film gets there.

Why are there nine sacrifices in Midsommar?

Nine is the number, and it was always the number. The festival held every ninety years requires nine sacrifices. The count fills out across the film: the two elders who go over the cliff at the ättestupa, the four outsiders brought specifically to be used, two Hårgan volunteers, and a ninth left open. The ninth is Dani's to name.

Did Pelle plan it from the beginning?

Pelle brought them for this. The friend who invites the group is Hårgan, and he has been selecting. He tells Dani, in the only genuine conversation anyone has with her all film, that Christian does not make her feel held — and he is right, which is what makes it effective recruitment rather than a lie.

Why does Dani choose Christian?

Christian hands them every excuse. He forgets her bereavement, takes Josh's thesis subject, and finally participates in the fertility rite with Maja while Dani watches through a gap in a wall. By the time she chooses, the film has made the choice look less like murder than like a verdict.

Does it matter that Dani is drugged?

The drugs are not incidental. Dani is dosed repeatedly and is tripping during the maypole dance and the crowning. The film is careful that her liberation is chemically assisted and never says whether that invalidates it.

Why does Dani smile at the end of Midsommar?

Two readings, and the film supports both.

She has been freed. Her family is dead, her relationship was a slow humiliation, and the Hårga have given her a role, a title and a hundred people who mirror her grief back at her — literally, keening alongside her on the floor. Read this way the ending is a horror film with a happy ending for its heroine, which is the most disquieting thing in it.

She has been harvested. Everything that looks like love is the output of a system that needed a May Queen and arranged for one. On this reading Dani has swapped a man who did not see her for a village that sees only her usefulness, and the smile is the moment she stops being able to tell the difference.

Aster does not adjudicate. The temple burns, Christian screams inside the bear, and the film cuts to black on a woman looking happier than she has looked in two hours.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean for a viewer.

Threat 080 is the signature and the warning. 91 works in the index score lower, which makes this one of the most purely human threats we hold. No demon, no curse, no ghost: a village of people who have decided something and are being polite about it. If what frightens you is other people agreeing with each other, this is close to a worst case.

Viscera 062 is higher than most people remember. 77 works score lower, and Midsommar earns it with perhaps four images rather than a sustained assault — but two of them are among the hardest in the index, and one arrives early and without warning in bright sunlight. It is more explicit than The Shining at 030 and less than The Thing at 088.

Era bias 090 means it looks and sounds completely contemporary. 96 works score lower. There is no grain, no analog hum, no VHS texture anywhere — this is clean modern digital craft, which is part of why the brightness is so effective.

Pace 026 means dread, and a lot of it. Only 35 works in the index are slower. This is a 147-minute film (171 in the director's cut) in which the plot is visible on a wall by the end of act one. Patience is not optional.

Tone 030 is less bleak than you would guess — 77 works score lower — because the film is funny, and because its ending is, for one person, a win. That is a real distinction from Hereditary at 008, where nobody wins anything.

On jump scares: there are essentially none. No shadows, no stings, nothing hiding. Everything frightening in this film happens in full view at a reasonable volume.