A24 Exclusive
Ari Aster’s 2019 folk-horror feature Midsommar ends with a choice. Not the one that Dani (Florence Pugh) makes as the new May queen of a neopagan community—whether to sacrifice her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) to their weird gods—but the choice that’s put before the audience: is this a happy ending?
There’s an irony here, given that both Midsommar and Aster’s career-defining horror film Hereditary (2018) revolve around the idea that our choices don’t really matter. The trap has sprung before we take our first step. Nevertheless, we still have to decide, if only how we feel.
No one will be excused from the festival.
Aster has described Midsommar as a breakup movie, and it is; the same way that Downfall is about a guy putting his career aside to marry his longtime girlfriend.
Whether Dani should give Christian the brush-off is a no-brainer. He is one of cinema’s worst boyfriends since Sid met Nancy. But her way of doing it goes a bit farther than blocking his calls. Has Dani exchanged Christian’s insanity for the far deeper madness of joining a cult? Is she healed at the end, or warped beyond healing?
Discussing this ending is no spoiler: Aster puts it right on the screen in the first few seconds of the movie, via a folk-art painting that shows every step Dani and her friends will take throughout the movie. The destination is known. The movie is about how we get there.
We first meet Dani in a state of profound isolation. Her mentally unbalanced sister has cut off all communication and she can’t reach her parents, so she calls Christian to talk her off the ledge. And calls. And calls. Christian tells her—probably not for the first or hundredth time—you know she’s like this; don’t let her manipulate you. His friends are giving him the same advice about Dani.
So here’s our first choice: is Dani needy and co-dependent, or is she simply reacting the way any of us would when our partner pushes us away in a crisis?
Yes.
Dani learns that her sister has killed herself and taken their parents with her. Christian exudes soothing while also backing as far away from her as possible: “I’m just going to that party for like forty-five minutes. You should keep sleeping.”
He’s more blunt among his friends: he can’t break up with her while she’s like this.
Said friends are planning a trip to Sweden’s remote Hälsingland region to attend a quaint midsummer festival in the home community of Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), the soft-voiced, nice guy of the bunch.
Christian’s other pals announce their total-dick credentials from the start.
Mark (the always-great Will Poulter) makes no secret of wanting Christian to cut Dani loose, but my guess is he doesn’t want Christian getting serious with anybody who might threaten the freedom of their little wolfpack. He’s a horny infant, forever sucking on the teat of his vape pen.
Theoretically, Josh (William Jackson Harper) is the smart one, since he’s planning to make this a serious research trip (in one of the film’s deft touches, he reads a book about the Nazi use of Runic symbols because he knows it will annoy Pelle). Really he’s a fool like Mark, just one with a better vocabulary.
Dani finds out that Christian’s heading out to Sweden with the gang when he announces it at a party. Master of passive-aggression that he is, Christian insists that he told Dani—then says fine, I won’t go, hope that makes you happy. He’s the one who lied, but she winds up apologizing to him.
Then Christian tells his friends he invited Dani along, but not to worry: she said yes but she’s not joining them (spoiler: she joins them).
All of this is prelude to a story that mainly takes place in Pelle’s idyllic-seeming farming community, who call themselves the Hårga. They’re friendly, they wear homespun garments embroidered with runes, they do a funny line dance called Skin the Fool, they have permissive attitudes toward sex and drugs—maybe it’s better to say coercive—and they’ve got a bear in a cage.
“Are we just not talking about the bear?” Mark asks. “It’s a bear,” one of the Hårga laconically replies.
Christian only wishes he had the Hårga’s mad gaslighting skills. They behave as if they’ve got nothing to hide—they even speak English for the benefit of “those not of Swedish tongue”—but pretty much everything they say after “hello” is a lie. The biggest of which is that Christian or any of his friends are getting out alive. They just have bigger cages than the bear.
The movie most frequently cited as inspiration for Midsommar, Robin Hardy’s 1973 folk-horror classic The Wicker Man, shares this basic recipe for slow-burn terror, as well as the ancient connection between eros and human sacrifice that pervades societies based on myths of regeneration. If you want to make babies, you’ve gotta spill your seed. If you want to make the crops grow, you better spill some blood.
That’s mostly where the similarities end (although the two movies would make a great double feature). The Wicker Man is about tricking a man into presenting himself at the place of sacrifice. Midsommar also lures victims to their doom by playing on their appetites and weaknesses, but the Hårga have a bigger prize in mind.
Christian may not want Dani. But they do.
Exactly why they want her of all her group, and how they go about getting her, was implied but never fully investigated in the movie’s theatrical version. One of the delights of Aster’s Director’s Cut—which debuted in 2020 and is available in 4K UHD or Blu-ray collector’s editions only from A24’s website—is that, while still leaving us much to puzzle out, it provides context and layers of meaning to Dani’s gradual transformation from outsider (“I don’t know what I’m doing here!” she tells Christian) to someone who isn’t just included in the community but elevated to May queen, its highest honor.
The folk-horror genre came into being on the heels of neopaganism, a loose collection of Ren Faire-worthy religions that purport to resurrect pre-Christian beliefs but are mostly younger than the telephone. We know very little about what folks like the Druids believed or how they practiced their beliefs. The Romans and Christian monks weren’t about to write any of that heathen shit down. So the neopagans basically made most of it up.
You get the feeling that the Hårga are doing the same. They have a goddess of “reciprocity.” Their religious text, the Rubi Radr, is finger-painted scrawls by a mentally challenged member of the community who was a deliberate product of incest. The elders “interpret” these smudges according to their own lights.
But the Hårga have rules. You don’t live past 72: Dani and friends get to watch two older members of the community take a face-dive off a cliff when it’s their turn. You don’t take a leak on the sacred tree where the ashes of their ancestors are scattered, which Mark does. You don’t take pictures of the Rubi Radr, which Josh does. The Hårga consider this rudeness, for which there is only one grim punishment.
And there are other rules. The Hårga may have brought Dani’s friends to their festival as candidates for human sacrifice, but it turns out they were also being evaluated as contributors to their very limited gene pool. “You could be getting that girl pregnant right now,” Mark tells Christian early in the movie, and as it happens that’s exactly what the Hårga want Christian to do to one of their girls. When it finally happens, it’s possibly the least sexy impregnation since Rosemary’s Baby. Nothing like having a crowd of naked people standing around chanting to help a guy perform.
Although it’s never stated directly, it’s impossible to miss the racial component of the Hårga’s careful breeding program. Many neopagan societies, including the German Thule Society, were obsessed with keeping Aryan bloodlines pure, and we do not see mixed-race children among the very pale Hårga. Maybe Josh was on to something with that book about runes and Nazis.
So wait, are the Hårga racists? Probably. It’s complicated.
Aster throws in a shot that only makes sense if you a) can read Swedish upside-down, or b) do enough Googling. A banner hangs across the road as the car nears the Hårga community. Translated into English, it reads: STOP MASS IMMIGRATION INTO HÄLSINGLAND. VOTE FOR FREE NORTH THIS FALL!
So there’s that going on in the neighborhood. On the other hand, the Hårga are unfailingly friendly and welcoming to Josh (who is Black), as well as to two other visitors, Connie and Simon (whose race is never stated; but the actors playing them, Ellora Torchia and Archie Madekwe, are Brits of mixed European, African, and South Asian ancestry).
Ari Aster has said that he didn’t have the races of his characters in mind when he wrote the parts, but the optics are difficult to ignore. Redheaded Christian is lured into siring a child on redheaded Maja (Isabelle Grill). There are hints that Mark, the only other white dude among the visitors, is being considered for a similar assignment with a girl named Inga (Julia Ragnarsson), but he blows it when he takes a whiz on her ancestors’ ashes.
The only one who’s seriously considered for induction into the Hårga community is Dani. Is it just because she’s blonde, or is something else going on?
This is where the Director’s Cut really earns the extra twenty-four minutes. Not because of the scenes it tacks on—although there is a good one involving the apparent near-sacrifice of a boy that turns out to be a fake-out—but because of little touches here and there, stray shots and runs of dialogue that help us understand how and why Dani was being indoctrinated even before she knew the Hårga existed.
If there’s a villain in Midsommar, it’s not Christian or even the elders of the Hårga community. It’s that nice boy Pelle who put the whole trip together, and who was so very glad that Dani decided to join them.
Blomgren plays Pelle with all the gentle affection that Dani isn’t getting from Christian. His mentors praise him for being “good with people,” and is he ever. He knows when to love-bomb Dani—giving her a drawing of her as May queen for her birthday—and when to pull back, suggesting that “maybe it’s not appropriate.”
As only the best bird-doggers do, Pelle comes in the guise of a friend. He reminds Christian about Dani’s birthday, which only gives Christian another chance to completely blow it. But his real masterstroke is to tell Dani that he understands her pain because he lost his own parents in a fire (um, exactly how did this happen, Pelle?). He never had a chance to feel isolated because he was “held” by the entire community.
“Does Christian feel like home?” Pelle asks, taking her hand. “Does he make you feel held?” Dani replies that Christian “could walk in any second,” which is the perfect way to answer that question. No, Christian clearly does not make her feel held. And yes, she’s very aware of what Pelle is offering her, and she’s telling him no. But she doesn’t say she doesn’t want to be held.
Various fan theories have suggested that the Hårga planned everything around Dani’s indoctrination, up to and including the deaths of her family. Some even propose that her parents were runaways from the cult. There are odd hints that this could be possible—Dani hallucinates seeing her parents in Hårga dress at one point—but they seem easily discounted, mainly because we don’t need them to explain the story.
What does seem clear is that the Hårga knew she was coming—one of the elders, Father Odd, says “welcome” to the others but “welcome home” to Dani—and are not only aware of Dani’s trauma but determined to deal with it in their own way.
One of the film’s best demonstrations of this seems to happen spontaneously (maybe, who knows) after Dani sees Christian having creepy cult sex with Maja. When she bursts into wails of agony—that Florence Pugh has got some pipes—the Hårga girls surround her, not just imitating but seeming to share her primal pain and betrayal, crying in perfect unison until she gradually begins to calm down. That’s how it feels to be held, folks.
Psychologists who study cults call this mirroring. We see examples of it throughout the film. The young people sleep in communal dormitories. Sometimes they stare into each other’s eyes and match their movements. Nobody eats until they all start eating at once. Mirroring works by erasing the boundaries between your own thoughts and feelings and the community’s.
The Director’s Cut shows us that Dani is also beginning to mirror the community without realizing it. In the scene where the boy proposes to drown himself, Dani steps forward to protest—and the rest of the Hårga instantly join in. Clearly this was a scripted ritual. So was Dani acting of her own volition, or merely falling in line with the will of the collective?
The Maypole dance, which the community uses to choose a May queen from their maidens, is a rare moment of euphoria. Dani’s drugged before the dance (nobody does anything in this movie without chemical stimulation), and in a dizzy moment, she begins to imagine that she can suddenly speak Swedish. The girl beside her responds as if she understands. But really Dani’s just bork-borking Swedish-sounding babble.
Drugs are another time-honored tool of cults for breaking down emotional defenses. At first, it’s all treated as youthful abandon (only Dani has a bad mushroom trip—never look into the mirror, Dani), but the mask slips by degrees. When Christian asks what’s in the glass handed to him by a young woman named Ulla (Liv Mjönes), she sees no problem in telling him that it “breaks down your defenses and opens you for the influence.”
Just before his mating with Maja, Christian gets another shot for his “vitality.” After the deed is done, he runs for cover (naked and serio-comically at half-mast), straight into old man Odd, who blows a paralyzing brown powder into his face. Christian wakes up just in time to see if Dani’s still mad enough to have him set on fire.
It’s too bad he can’t talk. I’m sure he’d have had a great explanation.
This is where we came in: where Dani has to make her choice, and we make ours. Does Christian have it coming to him? Are the Hårga healing Dani, or only using her trauma to manipulate her even more than Christian could?
Again, the Director’s Cut gives us some clues. Pelle is wearing a crown of green leaves. Bringing in Dani and three, count ‘em, sacrifices has clearly elevated his standing, and there are hints that he’ll get Dani as a reward. Maja, newly pregnant with Christian’s child, is the only one of the girls entitled to wear red. So the Hårga may be all about love. But it turns out that their love is mainly about status.
And Dani? Supposedly she has more love and power than any of them. But she’s wearing a huge dress of flowers, so heavy she can barely move in it. When the sacrificial temple begins to burn with Christian inside, she once more wails, and the community wails with her.
And then an uncomplicated smile breaks across her face.
“She has surrendered to a joy known only by the insane,” the screenplay tells us. “She has lost herself completely and she is finally free. It is horrible and it is beautiful.”
So it’s clear that Aster doesn’t want us to know if this movie ended right. He wants us to decide. I just hope to God I’m never that happy.
Not everything in this special edition of Midsommar is special. You get a nice picture book with a note from Martin Scorsese. But there’s no commentary, no making-of featurettes. You can’t even jump to a scene: we’re meant to watch this all in one go. Still, the 4K UHD transfer is phenomenal—turns out you really need that explosion of color in the flowers to drink in Dani’s madness—and the extra scenes make all the difference. They take us straight into Dani’s world. And they make us, if only for those two hours and fifty-one minutes, part of her dance toward madness.
