Movie Review: Midsummer Desert 2019

Midsommar: The worst movie ever?

By Jonathan Price

We live in a movie desert. Those of us not fortunate enough to live in LA or New York or some other hub of creative movie theater distribution encounter a summer full of sequels or remakes, no longer just the second or third, but now the fourth or perhaps the tenth. Or we can learn the sordid details about nearhistorical events with which we are mostly familiar. Or we can see the fantastic monsters created by CGI, or their mighty and clever semihuman superantagonists, who use wit and special weapons and skills to defeat them. Into this theater desert enters a film with an “o” and an “ar” in its spelling of midsummer, and I’m hooked by my attraction to foreign films, and to the memories of great Swedish movies.

Ari Aster

    There’s something about the Swedes. They seem to have a very rational society. They have a high standard of living and admirable socialism. Oddly and sadly, this has very little to do with a midsummer film set in Sweden and filmed in Hungary, and arguably the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It competes with The Sweetest Thing, a film where Cameron Diaz is trying on dresses and cavorts in her underwear, and is somehow distinctly unsexy and completely uninteresting, which is about all I remembered of that complex plot from 2002 until I just now looked it up in Wikipedia. A tremendously forgettable film. But Ari Aster’s Midsommar is worse. Please notice, I don’t say it is the worst film ever, offering a supposedly objective view. But offer only my own opinion as a lifelong film addict and periodic college instructor in film. Everyone has her own personal storehouse of mishits in the film department, a very short list of worst celluloid abominations ever, seemingly an embarrassment to all concerned, including the moviegoer. Nobody’s list has a lock on this.
    My opinion is articulated that way because there are actually people who liked the film, and critics who reviewed it with some respect – as a near-perfect mousetrap of a horror film. Rotten Tomatoes shows a critics’ score of 82% and an audience score of 61%. So I’m clearly in the minority. However, when I saw it last weekend with my wife, a woman of the couple next to us commented, archly, accurately, and profoundly, “Well, there’s two and a half hours of my life I’ll never get back.” Nevertheless I have a very good, perceptive, articulate friend who saw it and enjoyed it. Of course, he was born in Hungary, so maybe the settings subtly influenced him.
    Well, opinions differ, and Mark Twain says that’s why there are horse races. But I for one can’t understand why anyone would make a movie like this again, or even once.

You’ll have noticed that so far there’s hardly any data about the film itself except my distaste for it, intensely personal. Perhaps critics who profess guarded admiration for it are simply overintellectualizing and following a trend and ignoring what it might be like for an average unsuspecting viewer, like the victims in the film itself, such as critic Manohla Dargis in The New York Times, who said it had “more virtuosity than vision.”
    You might compare my reaction to that of those baffled viewers who reacted negatively to Antonioni’s Red Desert or Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour or Last Year at Marienbad, or any number of long, intense Bergman films, and then later were reassured and convinced by critics who explained their virtues and intricacies. But these were serious, original, intellectually and emotionally challenging films with comments and points about the human experience or the nature of society or the potential of human relationships. Midsommar seems to take that mix only to make a film that is a cross between a horror film (Aster is an admirer of Kubrick’s The Shining and incorporates a hexagon symbol from it into his Swedish midsummer nightmare) and a serious, slow European film.
    This juncture of a Scandinavian film to a horror flick doesn’t make for a happy marriage, or a happy anything. True, the redolence of a foreign film in the final syllable of “midsommar,” – and perhaps a very brief (and sadly inattentive) glance at a review – drew me to this film. The horror aspect was unknown to me, and the only two “horror” films I have some respect for or interest in might be Hitchcock’s Psycho and The Birds.

Midsommar begins, placidly and realistically enough, in sadly familiar territory, in the States with a bunch of slightly misogynistic male graduate students and a girlfriend of one whose sister has just committed mass family suicide. Soon we are whisked away to the bright, uncluttered Scandinavian countryside and a summer folk festival full of people in distinctive white costumes and sitting at long tables to eat – a combination of cult and formality and a bit of mystery. All this is bathed in whiteness and light. Which goes on forever. And I mean forever. Well, many great foreign films seem to have long scenes and long silences, for my money because they avoid the easy situation comedy jokes or quick violence and pain of perhaps more trendy films; the length of scenes leads somewhere, to insight and discovery.
    The American graduate students and a British couple are visiting this summer folk festival to explore Scandinavia and do a little anthropological research on the side. It seems kind of pointless and boring. Especially the long tables and the long meals and the seemingly quaint social rituals and dances, amid brief lectures from slightly stern elders.
    But even in this seemingly innocent, beautiful – if meaningless and pointless – place, there is trauma. Our first dramatic hint hits when an aging couple among the Swedish folk are taken willingly to a high cliff, and then plunge to their deaths on rocks. When it’s clear that one of the two is still moving and alive, another member of the publicspirited community comes up, stuns him senseless, and leaves him grotesquely disfigured. And dead. Supposedly this wonderful scene has cultural grounding in a (disputed) ancient practice called ättestupa.

Ättestupa

    Here emerges the stupidity and incredibility of the supposed innocent, the nonScandinavian, guests. They, like the dutiful anthropologists they profess to be, accept the glib explanations for the beauty and transcendence of this event and the rationale within the folk community for how appropriate this once-every-90-years morbid ceremony may be. And they stick around. Why is it such a horror film convention that key figures willingly go to isolated, dangerous, vulnerable places, and then associate with insane loners or group crazies? But often they are just vulnerable women (while here one of the women innocents becomes powerful, and even the goddess of May) or frightened teens. They ignore the signs, initiate no selfprotective or escape measures, and endure worse and worse consequences, including apparently torture and, for the surviving male, reverse group rape, after which he is stuffed into a bear outfit and immolated. The only excuse seems to be that they are periodically given drug-laced drinks, which they don’t question and willingly take. But these don’t exactly render them helpless. Instead these supposedly sophisticated graduate students become victims of an insane shared cultural delusion about as antihuman as can be imagined.

Florence Pugh

    Maybe the next time I want to see something Scandinavian, I should go see The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. True, many bodies litter the stage at the end; but at least it’s ennoblingly beautiful and has something of value for human beings. The only good things to say about Midsommar is that the setting is attractive, the cinematography is skillful, and the acting of the female principal character Dani (by Florence Pugh) is subtle and effective (she convincingly decides to have her boyfriend turned into a human torch).

Copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Price