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singedsunWe made it to a showing of Midsommar this afternoon. I have a lot of thoughts but I know horror movies aren't everyone's thing, nor has everyone that wants to see it had the chance yet. So I'm just going to stick my initial thoughts behind a cut.
If you have seen it, I'd be really interested to hear what other people thought.
Here's my short but hot take: Midsommar is not a good horror movie. Midsommar is no more a horror than an episode of Hannibal was. Are there elements of horror? Absolutely. Hannibal though was a dramatic crime procedural with horrific and gory elements.
Midsommar is the dramatic, fantastic and horrible story of grief.
That doesn't make it a horror movie.
Sure, the way our genres are created, movies (or television) with murders and gore get classified as horror based on exactly how those are examined within the film. Their either murder mysteries (this isn't that), crime procedurals/thrillers (definitely not) or horrors. So this is technically speaking, a horror film. But that's absolutely not the tale it's telling us.
Our main character begins the movie, not just with a shitty boyfriend who wants to dump her, but also with a sister who has killed both herself and her parents. That is absolutely the most horrific part of this whole movie. That a mental disturbed young woman kills herself and takes her parents with her, while elsewhere, her older sister has to live alone with that knowledge, with that earth shattering loss. That is the sort of tragedy that wrecks a person. And for Dani, our protagonist, she has no real support system. There is no one (aside from a once-mentioned therapist) that's capable of sitting with her while she's in pain. Her boyfriend, who wants to break up with this BEFORE this happens, isn't quite shitty enough to do it afterwards. So Dani's stuck in this limbo of grief where she can't get through it properly on her own, and there's no one able to help go through it with her.
Dani goes to Sweden with her boyfriend and his friends, one of whom is from this small Swedish commune. They go in mid-July, to what is a mid-summer festival. Part of this particular event hasn't happened in 90 years. Though there's some great world building behind this small commune, we only see a portion of it, so the extent of what's yearly and what's not is not well explained to the audience. Not that it matters.
I think the take away of the commune itself is that communities are going to community. We're taking about a tribe out of time with the modern age, despite some of it's members participating in it as a kind of Rumspringa (an 18 year long potential Rumspringa lol). What I'm saying is that the customs of this tribe while they present the "horrific" elements that make Midsommar a horror movie, they're not really presented that way. They're presented as well-preserved and fervently practiced beliefs of this small commune. This is a tribe doing what the tribe would do whether there were outsiders there (for the most part) or not.
The actual horror of the movie, is Dani's grief. She's constantly on the edge of a panic (I think panic, maybe anxiety) attack because she's going on this trip having not even begun to work on the grief she's dealing with from losing her sister and parents. Then, to make matters worse, she arrives at this commune where everyone processes things as a whole. They share, they process, they breathe, in unison with their members. They want people to feel whole as a member of their community.
The friend, Pelle, who is from this commune even posits to Dani whether or not she feels 'held' by her boyfriend. Knowing that of course, he's not capable of supporting her in the way he means. He is not home to her, he is not support, he is not love. Pelle tells her about the loss of his own parents when he was younger in order to explain that this community, this tribe of his, supported him like a family would when they were gone. Of course, we can suppose by the end sequence that his parents likely choose to be burned alive as part of their tradition, but we see immediately after the way the whole community feels that pain, that grief. Immediately, the whole of the tribe feels both the pain of those dying and the grief of those that have lost loved ones. The pain and the grief both are a shared experience.
And maybe it's a little less horrific by knowing that through this drastic scene of death, that Dani's grief begins to heal through what is a shared experience by the people who have accepted her as one of them. As family.
Midsommar is BEAUTIFUL on screen. I wish for an artbook because the detail in the embroidery and in the art and paintings is just phenomenal. The sound too, like for Hereditary, was pretty amazing. Ari Aster's use of both sound and visual storytelling is so slick.
And while some of the parts of the movie, as I said, are gory. They're presented almost remotely, distantly, even when we're up close to the blood. They're presented as set pieces, neat and clean and separate from the filth and guts that usually accompany such scenes. It's not supposed to be gross. Like with Hannibal, it's supposed to be a presentation. It's death by way of pageantry. I think it's presented that way because that's the way the community views it too. It's ceremony and celebration, it's ritual, it's holy. And that can't be horrific.
I've heard people talk about how there's this like mounting dread in Midsommar. I'm not sure that's how I felt though. I felt the tension, sure. I think if you sit with Dani, she's feeling real and visceral grief through almost the whole movie. But the end isn't horrific for her, it's relief, it's release. That's freedom and it's not horrible. It's beautiful.
If you have seen it, I'd be really interested to hear what other people thought.
Here's my short but hot take: Midsommar is not a good horror movie. Midsommar is no more a horror than an episode of Hannibal was. Are there elements of horror? Absolutely. Hannibal though was a dramatic crime procedural with horrific and gory elements.
Midsommar is the dramatic, fantastic and horrible story of grief.
That doesn't make it a horror movie.
Sure, the way our genres are created, movies (or television) with murders and gore get classified as horror based on exactly how those are examined within the film. Their either murder mysteries (this isn't that), crime procedurals/thrillers (definitely not) or horrors. So this is technically speaking, a horror film. But that's absolutely not the tale it's telling us.
Our main character begins the movie, not just with a shitty boyfriend who wants to dump her, but also with a sister who has killed both herself and her parents. That is absolutely the most horrific part of this whole movie. That a mental disturbed young woman kills herself and takes her parents with her, while elsewhere, her older sister has to live alone with that knowledge, with that earth shattering loss. That is the sort of tragedy that wrecks a person. And for Dani, our protagonist, she has no real support system. There is no one (aside from a once-mentioned therapist) that's capable of sitting with her while she's in pain. Her boyfriend, who wants to break up with this BEFORE this happens, isn't quite shitty enough to do it afterwards. So Dani's stuck in this limbo of grief where she can't get through it properly on her own, and there's no one able to help go through it with her.
Dani goes to Sweden with her boyfriend and his friends, one of whom is from this small Swedish commune. They go in mid-July, to what is a mid-summer festival. Part of this particular event hasn't happened in 90 years. Though there's some great world building behind this small commune, we only see a portion of it, so the extent of what's yearly and what's not is not well explained to the audience. Not that it matters.
I think the take away of the commune itself is that communities are going to community. We're taking about a tribe out of time with the modern age, despite some of it's members participating in it as a kind of Rumspringa (an 18 year long potential Rumspringa lol). What I'm saying is that the customs of this tribe while they present the "horrific" elements that make Midsommar a horror movie, they're not really presented that way. They're presented as well-preserved and fervently practiced beliefs of this small commune. This is a tribe doing what the tribe would do whether there were outsiders there (for the most part) or not.
The actual horror of the movie, is Dani's grief. She's constantly on the edge of a panic (I think panic, maybe anxiety) attack because she's going on this trip having not even begun to work on the grief she's dealing with from losing her sister and parents. Then, to make matters worse, she arrives at this commune where everyone processes things as a whole. They share, they process, they breathe, in unison with their members. They want people to feel whole as a member of their community.
The friend, Pelle, who is from this commune even posits to Dani whether or not she feels 'held' by her boyfriend. Knowing that of course, he's not capable of supporting her in the way he means. He is not home to her, he is not support, he is not love. Pelle tells her about the loss of his own parents when he was younger in order to explain that this community, this tribe of his, supported him like a family would when they were gone. Of course, we can suppose by the end sequence that his parents likely choose to be burned alive as part of their tradition, but we see immediately after the way the whole community feels that pain, that grief. Immediately, the whole of the tribe feels both the pain of those dying and the grief of those that have lost loved ones. The pain and the grief both are a shared experience.
And maybe it's a little less horrific by knowing that through this drastic scene of death, that Dani's grief begins to heal through what is a shared experience by the people who have accepted her as one of them. As family.
Midsommar is BEAUTIFUL on screen. I wish for an artbook because the detail in the embroidery and in the art and paintings is just phenomenal. The sound too, like for Hereditary, was pretty amazing. Ari Aster's use of both sound and visual storytelling is so slick.
And while some of the parts of the movie, as I said, are gory. They're presented almost remotely, distantly, even when we're up close to the blood. They're presented as set pieces, neat and clean and separate from the filth and guts that usually accompany such scenes. It's not supposed to be gross. Like with Hannibal, it's supposed to be a presentation. It's death by way of pageantry. I think it's presented that way because that's the way the community views it too. It's ceremony and celebration, it's ritual, it's holy. And that can't be horrific.
I've heard people talk about how there's this like mounting dread in Midsommar. I'm not sure that's how I felt though. I felt the tension, sure. I think if you sit with Dani, she's feeling real and visceral grief through almost the whole movie. But the end isn't horrific for her, it's relief, it's release. That's freedom and it's not horrible. It's beautiful.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-09 11:54 am (UTC)