Midsommar (2019)
Directed by Ari Aster
Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.
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What critics say influenced Midsommar
Aquí, en particular, parece evidente la relación de Midsommar con el gran clásico de Robin Hardy, The Wicker Man de 1973.
Whilst tonally Midsommar could be likened to Hereditary , and its folk horror mentality easily links itself to the 1973 British classic The Wicker Man , this film very much harnesses its own identity.
Visually the movie harkens back to other folk horror entries, most notably Robin Hardy's 1973 classic "The Wicker Man," with bright colors and a pastoral setting cleverly juxtaposed against the sinister activities.
It would seem like Ari Aster’s Midsommar is created from the same mold as Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973), The Green Inferno (2013) and other horror films that mine fear, shock and shlock from fictional cultures that swerve away from mainstream civilization.
Y de ahí podemos pasar por Holocasuto caníbal (Italia, 1980) y algunos capítulos de la hoy mundialmente famosa Eso (en sus dos capítulos, 2017 y 2019) y claro The Wicker Man (Reino Unido, 1973) esa obra maestra del terror bucólico dirigida por Robin Hardy y de la que Ari Aster pretende mamar.
En cualquier caso, el pitch de esta película, antes de que Aster aceptara escribirla, fue hacer “una versión de Hostel (2005) en un rito folclórico sueco”.
This culminates in the film feeling like an arthouse version of HOSTEL or CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, with detached westerners coming in to judge a different society while displaying their own horrible ways.
It’s been a staple of the horror genre as far back as An American Werewolf in London (1981), and more recently the formula was honed with the likes of Hostel (2005) and The Ruins (2008).
Louder, more gory horror films have been made about this idea (“Turistas,” “Hostel”), but now comes an unusual marriage of cautious observation with twisted motivation.
“Torture porn” was still in vogue (in some sense, it’s never not) and the company was envisioning a Hostel -style movie involving “American tourists going to Sweden and them being killed off during Midsummer,” the summer solstice festival with deep pagan roots.
The remainder of Midsommar plays like a high-toned version of Eli Roth's xenophobic gorefests Hostel (2005) and The Green Inferno (2013), following the American tourists (and a couple of British students they meet along the way) as they come to realize that Pelle's seemingly peaceful commune is really a death- obsessed cult.
Comparisons will inevitably be made to The Wicker Man (1973) (with shades of Shirley Jackson's haunting story The Lottery) and on a surface level they share similarities, but on a subtextual level they differ greatly.
The setup — civilized visitors among the eldritch agrarians — is overly familiar from films like “The Wicker Man,” and there are echoes of stories like “The Lottery,” songs like XTC’s “Sacrificial Bonfire,” documentaries like “Wild Wild Country.”
Likewise, Shirley Jackson’s classic short story “The Lottery” seems an obvious reference point as well.
When one of them pees on what turns out to be a sacred tree, well, you can guess we’re headed for a Wicker Man /Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” situation (to name just two folk-horror influences).
Movies like The Witch, or It Comes at Night, or Hereditary are not easy sells, and offer no simple encapsulations.
But Hereditary , The Witch , The Babadook , Get Out , and most recently, Us , prove the genre is ripe with potential.
Much like Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth and Robert Eggers’ The Witch , Midsommar belongs to a growing series of films by anointed male auteurs using cult homages to explore female sexuality – yet can sometimes seem contrived in intuiting the desires of their subjects.
One the one hand, Midsommar presents it pagan zealots as agents of ecstatic liberation, paralleling the way that Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015) ultimately portrays satanic pacts as preferable to stifling Puritanism (especially for women).
Midsommar has more in common with inaccessible cult thrillers like The Wicker Man (1973) and The Witch (2015) than mainstream horror faves like those in The Conjuring universe, but it may have some crossover appeal.
At least there is Florence Pugh, whose seamless transition from innocence to all-knowingness as the beleaguered Dani recalls a character in Robert Eggers’ The Witch, another movie that Aster has evidently seen.
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Midsommar me deslumbra como otro espejo social de Estados Unidos; un espejo como los que encontramos en formas intrigantes y grotescas en Don’t Breathe de Fede Álvarez y Get Out de Jordan Peele.
Similar to how fellow genre manipulator Jordan Peele ( Get Out , Us ) invites his audience to analyse his work, Aster has layered Midsommar with deeply contextual imagery – almost of a foreshadowing nature – but, at the same time, you don’t need to take it all in to appreciate what he has achieved.
The first, of course, was Us —which didn’t quite deliver the bracing kick of Jordan Peele’s debut Get Out , but it was a pretty gripping ride nonetheless.
Film-makers such as Jordan Peele (Get Out), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) and Robert Eggers (The Witch) are consistently forsaking traditional horror movie norms (shaky camera, jump-scares, buckets of gore) for something far more considered.
It’s no wonder director and Oscar-winning screenwriter Jordan Peele (Get Out) has been singing the praises of writer and director Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsommar over the past few weeks — Peele even called it “the most idyllic horror film of all time.”
It all felt too pompously overblown and lazily obvious to me, Aster channeling films like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man , Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (just to name three) as he attempts to bring his character-driven plunge into pagan ritual to life.
Placed in the permanent daylight of Harga, Midsommar is an heir to The Shining for showing terror in broad daylight.
This is obviously true of Rosemary’s Baby —probably Aster’s biggest influence—but also The Shining , Don’t Look Now , and The Wicker Man , all of which involve some degree of mordant comedy.
Dani has a nightmare full of what might be called Kubrickian visions while huddled beneath a blanket whose hexagonal decorations look like a cool-hued homage to the carpet in The Shining .
Bajo el manto del folk horror , con igual importancia, se incluyen cintas más ancladas a la brujería como The Witches (1966), Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), The VVitch (2015) o Hagazussa (2017), y las películas más apegadas a la idea de ritos ancestrales como The Ritual (2017), las dos joyas de Ben Wheatley, Kill List (2011) y A Field in England (2013), o la reciente Apostle (2018) de Gareth Evans.
For me though, I’d place the meaner leaner 1973 Wicker Man, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and maybe even Gareth Evans’ Apostle from last year higher.
It all felt too pompously overblown and lazily obvious to me, Aster channeling films like Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man , Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (just to name three) as he attempts to bring his character-driven plunge into pagan ritual to life.
As with Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (another movie Aster has clearly absorbed), the relationship here to The Wicker Man is both superficial—Hippies!
There is a whiff of Von Trier’s “Antichrist” to this movie’s gender politics, and there are also strong echoes of Alex Garland’s “Annihilation,” Ben Wheatley’s “Kill List” and especially Robin Hardy’s 1973 pagan-cult classic, “The Wicker Man.”
Visually and sonically, it’s perhaps the most beautiful horror movie since Argento’s Suspiria .
He’s essentially seeking to revitalise the aesthetics of arthouse horror films of the 1970s (specifically films like Suspiria, The Wicker Man and Don’t Look Now) but with a modern self-awareness.
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Aquí, por supuesto, la influencia de Black Narcissus (1947) es una de las más importantes referencias que Aster dio al joven fotógrafo Pawel Pogorzelski ( Hereditary ) y se nota.
Among the movie’s strengths are its glaring yet muted color palette, which thrums with pale shades of yellow and blue—a callback to the low-fi Technicolor of vintage horror flicks like Black Narcissus (1947).
Examples of the latter go back at least as far as Häxan (1922), and formed a micro phenomenon at the pagan-obsessed turn of the 1970s, when movies like Witchfinder General , The Blood on Satan’s Claw , The Exorcist and The Wicker Man summoned unpredictable, extra-textual evil in ways that enhanced or outright overpowered their ostensible moral narratives, like viruses devouring their hosts.
The film primarily told of a family torn apart by grief, before moving into the occult, and was touted by many critics as being this generation’s The Exorcist.
Ari Aster’s debut feature was compared to several horror classics, chief among them The Exorcist, but he was clearly following his own rules, his glacial mastery making the overall experience much more terrifying than any of the film’s individual moments alone.
A masterpiece to many, which attracted comparisons to The Exorcist , it sparked debates about ‘hype’, set a new bar for pure anxiety-inducing modern horror cinema, and took a healthy $80 million worldwide (off a budget of around $10 mill).