Mad Fiction Lab Mandatory Frog Dissection: Midsommaaaar (The A is for Art)

I would like to say for the record that in my experience Sweden is a very nice place full of nice people and pale food and winning Eurovision songs whose hicks are really some of the least likely of any country’s hicks to murder you and all your friends in some kind of mutant orgy of meat and flowers whose purpose and intended outcome is vague at best and nothing in particular at worst. Like, you are in way more danger in the hinterlands of the United States of Hills Have Eyes, in the general analysis of comparative murderhick studies, in both media and real life.

Which is part of what fucking works about this movie. Kudos to you, A24, we’d never even thought of being afraid of Swedish people before! How new and fascinating! In fact, the entire plot of Midsommar (which I will be discussing in depth so spoilers are on the menu, but don’t worry too much as it’s also not nearly as shocking as the hype would have you believe) will be very familiar to any casual fan of horror. It’s just that this plot usually involves groups of brown or Black or Indigenous people getting their “exotic” festivals of death on in the face of colonialist moral panic. Horror, historically, just adores sending in innocent white folk to be devoured and also embraced for no reason by a barbarian horde. The real twist of Midsommar is that it’s a bunch of the very whitest of people looking like nothing so much as a super awkward HOA meeting doing the ancient close-to-the-earth ritual of drugs and blood magic. 

Did I like Midsommar? I didn’t hate it. It’s got Big Problems, but it’s not a bad movie by any stretch. Part of me thinks I’m just too genre-savvy for a flick that plays everything as entirely straight as this bad boy does. Horror movies thrive on twists and turns these days, and A24’s other horror hits, The VVitch and Hereditary, are both firmly in that camp. All of Midsommar’s advertising seemed to hint that it also had stuffed its shirt with shocking reveals, but unless you have literally never seen a horror movie before, you will spend the entire TWO HOUR AND TWENTY-SEVEN MINUTE RUNTIME just yelling at the egregious fucking idiots on the screen OH MY GOD THESE PEOPLE ARE THE WORST which kind of kills the mood. With one exception, at no point did I not know exactly what was going to happen next, to whom, and how. 

Mainly because there are like three separate scenes where a giant tapestry tells you everything that’s going to happen, to whom, and how.

But let’s start with what I did like! POSITIVITY, PEOPLE.

First of all, this thing is just absurdly gorgeous. Every shot is beautiful and FULL OF MEANING, Florence Pugh is great and her American accent is DUMMY good, the imagery is unique and arresting and really sticks in your mind. The beginning is just a masterclass in screenwriting, it establishes the relationships as pretty heartbreakingly realistic, a relationship falling apart mainly because the dude, a poor man’s Chris Pratt, is the fucking worst goddammit Christian I hate you so much I’m glad you ended up in a bear, his friends are even more the worst than he is, and it’s all followed up by the only genuine shock in the story, which may actually be one of the worst things I’ve ever seen on film. In fact, the murder-suicide of Dani’s entire family is so awful (and so affectingly shot) that it almost makes the rest of the plot kind of meh. Yeah, yeah, Swedish sex cults but…I mean…jesus at least it’s not that. In another horror movie, the long panning shot from the garage up the gas tube into the parents’ bedroom and then Dani’s sister’s corpse with it taped to her face would be the final reveal and leave us depressed for days.

In Midsommar, it’s just the set up.

And after that, things move pretty fast and pretty normally. Just replace the typical “cabin in the woods” and five teenagers with “our weird friend’s weird Swedish commune none of us will ask any real questions about before booking international travel” and five fully grown adult graduate students including this completely traumatized woman whose dipshit boyfriend is super mad he can’t dump to go bang Swedish girls on his summer break without looking like the bad guy because AWKWARD HER ENTIRE FAMILY DIED.

It’s kind of Men Are Trash: The Motion Picture.

I would like to point out here that, except for Dani, they are all anthropology students, which means they should fucking know better at every stage. Dani is a psych student, but it doesn’t really matter. She’s out to lunch on trauma’s dime.

So they all do a bunch of drugs as soon as they get there and repeatedly throughout their stay, which I guess is supposed to excuse the main thing I kept making WILD EMOJI FACES about the whole time which is OH MY GOD WHAT DID YOU THINK WAS GOING TO HAPPEN HERE?

These five idiots turn up in rural Sweden and see a bunch of people in identical white robes dancing around handing out drugs like comedy club coupons in Times Square, constantly saying weird shit about god and “the Black One” and “the cycle,” living in giant barns with huge burning bears and bleeding vaginas either painted on them or embroidered on nearby tapestries and making everything by hand like psychedelic Amish and not ONE of them says: “So. This is a cult. This is a cult and we should leave. As I am an anthropology doctoral candidate, I can easily see that this is a big fuckoff cult and they are being WAY too open with outsiders about their deformed prophet and Murderfest 2019 rituals to think we are ever getting out of here. Let’s go get fucked up in Stockholm or something.”

In fact, at least one of them absolutely knows what’s up because when Pelle, the guy who brought them all here definitely not for the express purpose of being human sacrifices, says they’re having a festive Attastupa in the morning, Chidi (William Jackson Harper from The Good Place, his name is Josh but come on, it’s Chidi) gets all excited because he knows what that is. Both he and Pelle act coy like they couldn’t possibly explain it as it’s so MYSTICAL and ANCIENT, but it is not hard to explain, and it’s super weird that Chidi is so into it and also into not explaining, because it’s killing Gramma and Grandpa by yeeting them off a cliff and bashing their heads in with a circus hammer if they don’t die right away, which will definitely not be massively triggering for the girl whose parents just got murdered. See? I explained it. IT’S NOT THAT HARD WHY ARE YOU SMILING, CHIDI.

So THAT happens. And it takes FOREVER. And it’s WICKED GROSS. And the whole time the movie is like OOOOH WHAT GONNA HAPPEN and I’m like you are going to chuck those nice old people off the cliff do you even cult? Naturally everyone freaks out and somehow the cult President or whatever manages to ball “No, no it’s FINE you see because they were 72 and that’s gross so we kill them so they don’t get even grosser by living longer!” AND NO ONE SAYS OKAY COOL COOL COOL NOW ARE WE LEAVING? They even kind of agree that 72 is really yucky and no one would want to live longer than that so it really is best to get your head beat in by a tweenager because the ciiiiiircle of liiiiiife.

In fact, at no point does anyone bring up how these people can get away with the Holy Yeeting of the Olds which, given how grey a lot of the cultists are looking, has to happen with some regularity, when this is 2019 and police exist, as well as census takers who would eventually notice that everyone in Happy Flower Town dies at exactly 72 in the fiery ritual of Carousel and apparently no one has ever left this Church of Loose Undefined Paganism because surely they would mention to someone that every year Gam-Gam and Paw-Paw got got over by Ye Olde Hiking Trail. All the students act like this is the 19th century and they’ve discovered an uncontacted tribe whose way of life they can neither judge nor disrupt. But they’re bloody well not, they have REGULAR DAD HAIRCUTS and probably order at least some shit off of Amazon because subsistance farming in northern rural Sweden is a HUGE BUMMER especially when a shit ton of their land seems to be devoted to decorative flower farming, so I don’t think they could afford to lose any single pair of capable hands out of this group of maybe 100-150 IKEA training video extras (and much is made of how they don’t have enough people to avoid incest without regular outside DNA donors so it might be less than that) let alone having their young people off on Rumspringa all the time (where no one ever says wow it’s so cool not living in a murdercult with no running water I should probably tell someone about Gam-Gam) and again, immediately dunking anyone who turns 72 off the cliffs of insanity.

Naturally, the two people of color, who are technically Londoners but get so few lines that it barely matters, get obviously murdered first. They disappear and there’s a whole song and dance about the train and only enough room in the car for two but I don’t really know who it’s supposed to fool when the very next scene is the whole village preparing the most amazing meat pies ever. (Which you want to assume are Simon and Simon’s girlfriend pies, but weirdly enough, it’s never confirmed to be either way, and the pubic hair found in Christian’s pie has another source, so I guess they could just be normal pies? But they spend a lot of time on long slow shots of them, so if they’re just regular Swedish meatballs it would be an odd choice.)

Again, no one says “Okay NOW we’re leaving because not only have we just witnessed a double murder but two of our people are mysteriously missing and I have in fact seen a moving picture before in my useless life.” Nope, they all go ooooh, Imma do my thesis on this! Let’s do more drugs first tho. Don’t worry about the girl we brought she’s fine she’s just completely dissociated in a corner because of all the recent murder. Back to my academic future!

REALLY? You think the murdercult is going to just let someone publish a paper on their murderous ways? Why, because you’re just so awesome? Again, this is 2019. If someone does a neat book report on human sacrifices in rural Sweden, it’s not just going to be an A+ and a gold star, people are going to go investigate and arrest them. So when the elders agree to let Asshat and Doucherocket do their theses on their most secret rituals, it does not take a genius to know they just plan on killing them all so it doesn’t matter what they do their book report on.

And on we go, paint by numbers style. The grad students get picked off one by one, with increasingly hilarious excuses of “Um…they took the train! They took the truck to the train without telling you or anyone they were leaving!” until we’re down to just Dani and her shitheel meathead boyfriend Christian, who just stares dumbly at everything desperately wishing he looked just a little more or a little less like Chris Pratt, not questioning anything ever, not even the weird “tea” they keep getting dosed with because if there’s one thing American college students don’t care about it’s what’s in their drink. (And what is it? Well, I don’t know what’s in hers, but Christian’s is definitely menstrual blood, because the tapestry said so THIS REVIEW MAKES ME WRITE SUCH WEIRD SENTENCES). 

Dani somehow wins the worst dance dance revolution tournament and gets crowned May Queen, and Christian gets told that the reason he found a pubic hair in his possibly-but-not-definitively-human pie and had to drink blood is that Maja, an underage weirdo, has been chosen to mate with him because astrology and that was a love spell. 

K.

No, that’s his response. 

K. 

He doesn’t blink or even say nah. He says: “I think I ate one of her pubic hairs.” And the cult Presidents says “Sounds about right.” 

Literally those are the lines. I can’t even make fun of it, it’s amazing. It’s just the whitest possible reaction to any of this, no emotion at all, no curiosity, no feeling of aight imma head out, just: my food was weird.

What follows is easily the most awkward sex scene ever committed to film. It also goes on FOREVER. It also is so ridiculous in and of itself that it’s almost unmockable. I’ve seen some people say it’s a rape scene, and maybe, but Christian hears all about what’s going to happen before it does and he doesn’t even look surprised that they want to mate him with an underage girl, let alone call for the check and his coat. The only hesitation he shows is when, well, all the elder ladies of the village including presumably Maja’s mom are on deck to cheer him on. I guess it depends on whether you think menstrual Kool-Aid really works as a club drug. 

And that’s where some of my deeper issues come in.

One of the things I found most frustrating a couple of days after watching this thing is that, for all the emphasis on the anthropology here, there is no sense of why any of this is happening from an anthropological perspective. Shortly after the World Cup of Cringey Boning, which Dani of course sees and freaks out because her fratbro walking dong of a boyfriend cheating on her is 100% the worst thing that’s happened to her recently (did she not think maybe something more than a quick shag was going on when she saw all the naked old ladies standing around him chanting and moaning?), a guy in long white robes and a hilarious SuperCuts 40s Working Man hairstyle announces calmly with no flowery language at all that, masks off, folks, as we all know, Bob, every 90 years we here in Buttfucksville, Sweden hold a good ol’ fashioned human sacrifice.

K. 

Why?

It’s never mentioned. Since they all die at 72, there is literally no one in this crowd who can have been present for the last Midsommar Horror Hoedown, so they’ve got to be just winging it as far as the actual specifics, and in order for any tradition to survive into a generation of people who have never experienced it, there has to be a clearly defined desired outcome. Do they get to live forever? Clearly fucking not. Does sacrificing people bring better crops or prosperity or keep the forces of civilization at bay? Are they resurrecting a dark god? What is the point of all this? At least Lovecraftian cults are goal-oriented. Why do they have to do it? Did God tell them? Because that’s another interesting point: they never mention who they are sacrificing nine people to. They reference the Black One and wanting to defy him in some way, but it’s completely unclear who the demanding deity is in this situation. Their prophet is a deliberately inbred child who does finger painting and then the elders interpret it, but a. the disabled community appreaciates your support there, bucko and b. That’s a prophet, not a god, and the kid doesn’t seem to care about any of this at all. The cultists seem to be, and it’s pretty important for the end that they be, pretty loving and normal outside all of this 90 year cycle stuff, so what gives with cutting off those grad students’ faces and wearing them like Halloween masks? Is that part of the ritual or just funsies because you don’t have TV?

And why nine people? Nine is just so fucking cool? This orgy of death brought to you by the number 9? Big Lennon fans?

This is just A LOT of work, EXTREMELY YUCKY work, and a lot to explain to kids that like hey, not tomorrow or anything but heads up: when you’re forty or whatever we’re all gonna kill (and maybe eat?) nine people because reasons. Why? SHUT UP LARS, THAT’S WHY. And again, knowing this (because since we’re having such fun with numbers, they all absolutely know who’s going to have to do this thing and who’s gonna get a note from the suicide cliff and be excused) when they go on their pilgrimages between the ages of 18-36, the MOST RELIABLE of ages when it comes to keeping secrets, not one single person is soft-hearted enough, or excited by the prospect of a life of Netflix and Not Killing to go: you know what? I’m gonna call the cops. No, I’m gonna do a tweetstorm, then call the cops.

There is no actual magic in this movie. No gods or reasons behind what they do. Which is why I really wonder about the Very Bad Tea they keep chugging. Menstrual blood is not actually molly. Maybe if these were the descendents of some Swedish sea monster or something it would be, but it’s just a weird girl and the extremely explicit tapestry no one notices that told her the best way to bag a man is to fix him a nice moontini. We don’t see what’s in any of the rest but that is some extremely good shit if 1/8 cup of a very light-colored tincture just obliterates them completely. Is there ANY crop that grows in that climate that provides that level of recreational brain-slapping? That goes on for at LEAST 24 hours but usually longer? So who originally came up with the 90/72 Crossfit Human Sacrifice plan? Why do they have magic menses? Do any of these people pay taxes? Who cuts their hair? I kept constantly asking: what is a normal non-sacrifice day like for this Village of White Devils with their perfectly clean linens yet no washing machines? Ha ha remember when we killed all those people, Sven, that was so funny I can’t believe you stuck that one guy’s leg in the flowerbed I nearly pissed myself laughing pass the meat pie LOL I mean the other meat pie! Ah, the period blood punch is particularly fine today! If there’s at least a year if not more between Olds Yeeting and 90 years between Snackrifice-O-Rama, that is SO MUCH TIME to just live normally without all the excitement of bursting heads with hammers like a Gallagher show and also to maybe question why we have to do this, can’t we just have universal health care and watch Eurovision and enjoy a high standard of living like everyone else in this country?

WHAT IS THE POINT?

I just don’t believe you keep doing all this if there’s not a really clear benefit to everyone involved. You have to get up SO EARLY to make a blood eagle out of a dude and distill all the amazing drugs from whatever shit crops you can manage with a growing season of about five minutes. AND transcribe the finger paintings of a deformed child? I mean, really, who has the time?

As far as the end, I knew it was coming before the movie started. I mentioned it’s produced by A24, which has done a lot of innovative stuff lately and that’s great, buuuuuut…their horror movies all have the same ending. The cult always wins. The cult isn’t always very nice, but it always wins, and the script tries to make you feel pretty good about it in a cozy family way even though the family is cannibals or demon worshippers or actually baby-eating Satan. This, as far as I can tell, is A24’s moral of every story. Pure nihilism with a hug.

A BEAR HUG.

So yeah, they give Dani a choice whether to sacrifice a stranger or Christian, and at this point the audience at home is chanting CHRISTIAN! CHRISTIAN! because he is such a complete package of shit, and although it’s not entirely justified that someone should DIE burned up inside a BEAR because they were a garbage boyfriend, you don’t feel real bad about it either and yes, they sew him into a gutted bear (there’s so much bear foreshadowing in this movie on a second watch it actually feels heavy-handed once you know the end. BEARS EVERYWHERE) which looks less horrifying than I suspect they wanted it to because it’s just Andy from Parks and Rec all snug in a fursuit looking confused like he expects April to jump out any minute, which would admittedly be on brand for April. He gets burnt up with all the other bodies and no one is sad. The most beautiful image of the whole movie lurches past the fire and Dani is clearly gonna stay with the cult and make little cult babies with her fresh DNA and continue to never ask any questions ever. But I guess she doesn’t have to pay the mortgage anymore?

It’s honestly a bit of a lazy choice to make all the dudes in this movie complete assholes. (Minus the Londoners who have no character at all). And SO incurious. It would be easy to write them using their knowledge and skills to try to escape and being trapped and thwarted at every turn. Instead they just derp their way through staring sullenly at their cannibal treats and not talking to each other like this isn’t supposed to be a Very Arty Film that’s Not Like Other Horror Movies. I never felt worried for them because they sucked bear-butt and I wanted them to die. There could have been much more tension if any of them were not braying frat donkeys. Even Chidi, who is the best of them, goes to steal the holy books for his AmAzInG tHeSiS so he sucks too. None of them care about each other or Dani, and Pelle, who brought them all here to be sacrificed, clearly brought Dani to be his gross cult wife and may have even killed her family (it’s pretty weird how her sister’s body is arranged and taped up and covered in vomit like there was a struggle) so fuck em all up, Sweden.

I cared about Dani. I worried for her. Once she was May Queen she was either going to get lit up like a firework or rule the tribe forever (and the barn painting show a girl covered with flowers on fire, so it’s a bit of a cheat that that’s the only thing that doesn’t happen) so I guess I’m glad she found her smile again at the bottom of a pile of murder? On the other hand, the radical empathy the cult is so invested in is clearly performative and not genuine—they moan with Christian but don’t feel pleasure, scream with Dani but don’t understand her pain. They have just made all emotion communal as well as food, sex, children, and death. And in sharing it, make it meaningless. Those screaming women don’t even know Dani’s family is gone. They think it’s all about a cheating boyfriend. They aren’t connected to her, they’re just feelings vampires. They’re super nice to her the whole time and mean to the boys because they want her womb for the village, not because they love her. So it’s not such a happy ending as all that. Except that Christian is burnt up. Doesn’t seem like the kind of extra-privileged and babied guy who’s family would ever come looking for him. This should all be fine. (That should be the title of this movie. This Is Fine.) It feels like group therapy but it isn’t, in part because group therapy doesn’t usually—but not never!— end with everybody burning to death except the girl who “won” therapy. And the last two victims seem to think they’ve been given painkillers but suffer and die horribly with no relief anyway so that the village can have a fun catharsis picnic with the screaming and the moaning—again for no ultimate beneficial purpose we are ever told.

Neat?

In conclusion, this is what happens when you leave white people alone too long, this or ABBA, and also what happens when you just politely eat what your hosts serve because your mother taught you not to be rude. And also you are too stupid to live and in no way paid the littlest bit of attention in your anthropology classes.

Happy Solstice, Everyone!