9 / 10
Official trailer
Grief in the Snow
Midsommar opens in a snowbound American winter with a family tragedy so devastating that I won’t describe it here.
Dani, a college student, loses everyone she has in one night. Her boyfriend, Christian, has been planning to break up with her for months. Now he can’t, or won’t, and he stays with her out of guilt.
That opening is as harrowing as anything Ari Aster put in Hereditary. Everything that follows depends on it. Dani is drowning. Christian is a coward. And when he half-heartedly invites her along on a trip to Sweden with his friends, she says yes, because she has nowhere else to go.
This film disturbed me in a way few horror films manage. I think it’s the best breakup movie of its decade, the kind where you end up furious at the boyfriend and a little uneasy about how well you understand the ending. My one gripe is the length. Everything else here grips me completely. Aster has said he thinks of Midsommar as a breakup movie dressed as a folk horror film, and that’s exactly what it is. The horror is real, and the relationship drives it.
For Writers
Aster opens with Dani’s devastating loss, then puts her in a relationship with a man who can’t support her. The horror of the film grows directly out of her grief and isolation.
The most effective horror is personal. Give your character a wound, a loss, a loneliness or a need, before the monster ever appears. Then make the monster, or the cult, or the haunted house, offer something that speaks to that wound. The reader will understand why your character stays, even when every instinct says run. Write down what your character needs most at the start of your story. Then make sure the danger they face offers them exactly that. If you want to go further, read Writing Horror.
The Hårga
Their Swedish friend Pelle takes them to his home commune, the Hårga, for a midsummer festival that happens once every ninety years. It’s gorgeous. The sun barely sets. The fields are full of flowers, the people wear embroidered white clothes and smile a lot, and the buildings are covered in strange, beautiful paintings that tell stories nobody explains.
And it’s deeply wrong from the start. The smiles are too wide.
The rules are strange. Then the elders perform a ritual at the top of a cliff, in front of everybody, and the Americans realize these people have very different ideas about life and death. From then on, the film tightens like a noose, in full sunlight.
The daylight is the film’s masterstroke. Horror is supposed to happen in the dark. Here there’s nowhere to hide, and every terrible thing happens in bright, lovely, relentless sunshine. I find that more upsetting than any shadowy hallway, because the film never gives my eyes a place to rest.
For Writers
The horror happens in bright sunlight, in a beautiful meadow full of flowers. The absence of darkness makes it more disturbing.
Take one frightening scene in your story and move it to the brightest, most pleasant setting you can imagine. See how much more unsettling it becomes. Sunlight strips away the reader’s comfort, because they can’t tell themselves that things will be better in the morning.
Readers expect danger in shadows. Putting it in daylight, in a lovely setting, unsettles them, because there’s nowhere to hide and nothing to blame on the dark.
Contrast between setting and event makes both more vivid, and it gives you a fresh way into scenes readers think they’ve seen before. My piece on settings that do real work digs into this.
Florence Pugh
Florence Pugh gives a performance horror films almost never get. Dani is fragile, anxious and constantly apologizing for her own grief, trying not to be a burden to a boyfriend who treats her like one. There’s a scene where she sobs so hard her whole body convulses, and it’s almost unbearable to watch. I’d rank it with the finest acting the genre has seen, and it’s the main reason this film sits at a 9.
As the festival goes on, Dani changes. The women of the Hårga notice her pain, take her in and give her something Christian never did: a sense of belonging. Pugh charts that change beautifully, and by the end, you understand exactly why Dani makes the choice she does, even as you’re horrified by it.
Christian
Jack Reynor plays Christian, and he’s the most useless boyfriend ever put on screen. He forgets Dani’s birthday. He tries to steal his friend’s thesis topic. He never listens, never helps and never admits he wants out. Reynor plays him perfectly, a spineless, self-absorbed man who thinks he’s being a good guy.
His friends aren’t much better. Will Poulter plays Mark, a crude idiot who can’t stop leering at Swedish women and ends up disrespecting the wrong tree. William Jackson Harper plays Josh, a serious anthropology student who cares more about his thesis than about the people disappearing around him. None of them take the place seriously, and all of them pay for it.
Beautiful and Horrible
No horror film has ever looked lovelier than Midsommar. Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography is bright, painterly and full of flowers, and the production design, with its tapestries, costumes and wooden temples, is obsessively detailed. Every frame looks like a folk painting come to life.
When the violence arrives, it’s sudden, graphic and shocking, made worse by the calm, sunny setting around it. The film is also strangely funny in places, darkly absurd in the way the Americans keep trying to be polite about things that are clearly monstrous. It’s a very specific tone, and Aster nails it.
The May Queen
Late in the film, Dani joins a dancing competition with the women of the commune, and after hours of dancing, she’s crowned May Queen. She’s covered in flowers, celebrated and embraced, and for the first time in the film, she’s happy.
Meanwhile, Christian has been drawn into a ritual of his own, a bizarre, disturbing scene nobody forgets, and when Dani discovers it, the Hårga women scream and sob alongside her.
They feel what she feels. Christian never did. That shared grief is the most powerful thing the commune offers her, and it seals her choice. I think that wailing chorus is the scariest moment in the film, and there isn’t a drop of blood in it.
For Writers
When Dani discovers Christian’s betrayal, the women of the commune scream and cry with her, sharing her pain. She never got that from him, and it wins her over.
If you want to explain why a character joins a dangerous group, show what the group gives them that their old life didn’t. Cults win people with belonging, attention and understanding. The threats come later. Make your dangerous community appealing to your character. Give them one scene where the group meets a need nobody else has met. That’s when the reader will understand the choice, and fear it. The more appealing you make the group, the more frightening the price becomes.
The Smile
The final scene, in and around a burning wooden temple, is horrifying and strangely triumphant. Dani, the May Queen, decides who will be sacrificed. She watches the fire. And slowly, through her tears, she begins to smile.
Recent horror has no better final shot. You’re watching something monstrous, and you’re watching a woman freed from a relationship that was killing her. Aster makes you feel both at once. It’s disturbing because part of you is cheering.
What Drags
It runs about two hours and twenty-seven minutes, and the director’s cut is longer still.
The middle sags as the commune’s rituals pile up, and some viewers find the pacing tedious. I’d have trimmed twenty minutes of ceremony without losing anything that matters, and that’s my only real complaint. The violence is extreme and some of it is hard to watch, and I think every shocking image deserves its place.
Midsommar is a gorgeous, disturbing, darkly funny horror film and about as original a breakup story as I know, built around a staggering Florence Pugh.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Midsommar disguises a relationship drama as a folk horror film. Every horrific event in the commune reflects the emotional truth of Dani’s relationship, and her final choice resolves both stories at once.
Genre stories often work best when the external threat mirrors an internal conflict. The monster can stand for something the character is already struggling with.
Identify the emotional conflict at the center of your genre story, and make sure the climax of the external plot also resolves it.
Bring Sunglasses
Yes, if you can take it. It’s a 9 because Pugh, the sunlight and that final smile add up to a horror film that means something, and the only thing holding it back is a middle that drags. It’s graphic and it’s long. It’s also a hell of a film, and I’d put it up against anything the genre has produced in years.
