Ari Aster’s Midsommar: Hidden Meanings, Cultural Significance, and Genre Innovation
Director: Ari Aster
Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski
Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor
Production Company: Square Peg, B-Reel Films
Districution Company: A24 (USA), Nordisk Film (Sweden)
Released: 2019
Country: USA, Sweden
In this film, we follow Dani (Florence Pugh) as she accompanies her boyfriend and his friends on an academic trip to Sweden for a very special midsummer festival. The film begins with an amazingly dark sequence of narrative and shots that show Dani’s bi-polar sister in her successful suicide attempt and their sleeping parents murdered in their house by way of tubes of carbon monoxide taped to their mouths, which trace back to their running cars in the garage. Dani goes to her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor) in solace and distress, after Christian has discussed with his friends his plan to break up with Dani. His friends; Josh (William Jackson Harper), Mark (Will Poulter), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) are all anthropology graduate students in the same program at their university and had been planning to go to Sweden to study the Harga people, a commune where Pelle grew up, during their festival event. They reluctantly invite Dani out of pity on their academic boys’ trip.
Upon their arrival, they are greeted by Pelle’s communal brother Ingemar and his English friends Simon and Connie, and begin with a ritualistic drink, which sends the group into a psychedelic mushroom trip. Under the influence of the drug, Dani has hallucinations of her dead sister. Upon entering the gates of the commune, they observe strange runic shapes of buildings, and explicit and troubling murals of stories of love potions, bears, and period blood in drinks. Dani and the boys are deeply disturbed after viewing the commune’s ritual of the attestupa, where two of the commune’s elderly leap off a cliff while the rest of the commune watches and wail when they land and are still alive. Dani and thr group decide to stay, out of respect for the traditions of the Harga, and as the festival is the subject of Josh’s graduate thesis. Simon and Connie decide to leave, though they get split up in their efforts. Members of the commune are very enthusiastic in Connie to the airport.
Halfway through their trip, Christian vocalizes his decision to also do his graduate thesis on the Harga, creating tension between him and Josh. Josh is very curious about the commune’s ancient and traditional runic practices. The commune is guided by a proclaimed oracle named Rubin who was conceived through incest, and paints runes when they are revealed to him by the gods. After Mark unknowingly takes a pee on an ancestral tree and infuriates members of the cult, he is guided away by a female member who he previously stated he found attractive. That night, Josh is shown pretending to fall asleep with a camera in his shoes, and he sneaks out to photograph the cult’s sacred runic text in their temple. He is distracted by a man wearing Mark’s skinned face and is hit over the head by a mallet and dragged out of the temple.
The next afternoon, Dani is pressured into drinking a special drink, which we later learn has more psychedelics in its contents and participates in the midsummer festival’s maypole dancing competition. She wins as the last girl standing, and is crowned the May Queen, a new esteemed title in the cult. While this happens, Christian is drugged and is coerced into participating in a sex ritual where he is used to impregnate one of the young girls in the cult, Maja, in a room surrounded by other nude female cultists who watch and interact. Dani comes looking for Christian after her danced, in distress, and finds him and Maja having sex. She has a panic attack and falls to her knees while other Harga women swarm around her and empathetically, mimicking her cries. After Christian has finished the sex ritual, disoriented from the drugs, he stumbles into a building where he finds Simon in a blood eagle position; hanging from the ceiling, his back cut open and lungs exposed, still breathing. Christian is then paralyzed by an elder and faints.
The cult explains to Dani that the commune must be purged of its evil by way of nine human sacrifices. Simon, Connie, Mark and Josh are the first four victims, lured to the insides of the commune by way of Pelle and Ingemar. The next four victims are two of the elders who sacrifice themselves and two lucky volunteers, Ingemar and a man named Ulf. Dani, as the May Queen, gets to pick the ninth and final victim; Christian, now paralyzed inside of a disemboweled bear, or a villager. Distraught, betrayed, and angry over his recent behavior and disloyalty, she choses Christian. All of the living victims are placed inside a sacrificial temple alongside the other already dead victims. The temple is set on fire, and as Ulf begins to scream in pain, the cult wails with him as they watch. Upon first seeing the burning, Dani cries in distress and horror, but eventually smiles as the camera goes dark.
Ari Aster, the writer and director of the film, communicates stifling dread in the most profound way. His previous film, Hereditary (2018), is a grief made story about ancestral vulnerability, demonic mythology, skillfully gory images and creepy miniature models are things of nightmares. In both movies, we see parallels of grudge-filled and deeply claustrophobic domestic helplessness infused into every shot and line of dialogue (Laffly).
Midsommar was inspired by a number of classic films, including Albert Brook’s breakup movie Modern Romance, Powell and Pressburger’s religious horror tale Black Narcissus, and folk horror of The Wicker Man, in which the outsider main character is placed inside of a wooden statue and burned. “I go back to those, and so many of them seem so much more modern than anything I’ve seen now… I find I am so inspired by the level of invention in those films” Aster says (Lopez). Aster made another intriguing comparison last year when he called Midsommar the “Wizard of Oz for perverts” (Rose). Dani would be Dorothy, with her male companions as analogies of the Cowardly Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow. Both narratives feature storms (physical and emotional), magic and witchcraft, and hallucinogenic plants. Dani and the group even enter the gates of the Harga commune by a path of yellow flowers – a yellow brick road?
Horror films are effective in their emotional response in audiences. “Horror burrows under our skin because it clobbers of the core principles, we “modern people” cling to — the world may be confusing, but it is ultimately knowable. Through study and medicine and technology, we can control everything from our emotions to the weather” (Wilkinson). Aster seems to understand this principle well enough to twist it, by first developing a sense of horror and dread about the ordinary things of life before they spiral off into a chaos of extraordinary. Using a clever mix of factually true ancient practices and the cinematic tradition of using folklore as a source of fear and horror, Aster puts his audiences into a place most don’t understand, with uncertain emotions and terrifying fears of what will come next. This film is also categorized by terms such as “daytime horror” and “elevated horror,” which are somehow supposed to attract viewers who wouldn’t consider watching regular “horror” films, viewing is as lowbrow and beneath them. “Elevated horror” suggest that of higher social intelligent significance. “A label design by some promotional wizard to distinguish degrees of horror for separate demographics” (Eggert). It gives audience members who wouldn’t associate normally with horror genre films a reason to venture into that new, dark territory.
The term “daytime horror” is used because almost every scene of the film is shot during the bright light of day. The narrative takes place in an aesthetic pastel colored summery wood, with the cult members all dressed in white. There is nothing visually dark in this film, if we’re talking about color. Black Narcissus was said to inspire Aster in his use of color in the film. "The first reference I brought to my cinematographer, who was also one of my best friends, Pawel Pogorzelski, was Black Narcissus...this idea of this totally stripped Technicolor look." (Lopez). Aster says that the editing team and himself went through all the ranges during color correction to find the right saturation that evoked the concept of Old Hollywood Technicolor, but without mimicking it.
There are many ways to approach the overarching theme of Midsommar. On the surface, it is a film about a breakup, which comes along with grief, betrayal, and in some cases a symbolic or literal burning ritual. The film’s vast subject matter also sheds light on the reaping notions of white male privilege, American entitlement (that literally pisses on what’s not theirs), and most importantly, female empowerment (Laffly). It is also a study on the brutality of existence and violent acts of birth, reproduction, and death. Society may find scrambled ways to make these crude moments of life and its cycles seem less awful, through attitudes and perspectives. Whether one celebrates the seasons of life or fights them, welcomes changes with open arms or mourns them, it’s still bad, and there is no way to get through it but look at it straight in the eye and smile through the savagery. Midsommar is obessed with the passage of time and the cycle of seasons, and the ways humans scramble to make sense of life’s biggest changes (Wilkinson).
Rueben, the commune’s oracle, is more important as a symbol and an idea than he is even as a character. Rueben has little to no speaking lines because of his mental state, he is the product of incest and therefore has many disabilities, mental and physical. He was purposefully inbred to be a conduit for the word of the gods, said to have unclouded judgement because of his pure blood and mental condition. In a scene in the film during the trail of the nine victims, Rueben is seated upon a seat covered in cotton, writing energetically, almost like he is sitting on a cloud. Rueben is an articulation of what the film may be trying to say politically. Aster says perhaps his depiction of Reuben is a critique of the global rise of xenophobia and return of the far right in Sweden. He said in an interview, “If you consider Swedish history, it is a very closed society. And what does that really mean? There are things happening in Sweden right now that are echoes of things that happened in the Second World War” (Snyder).
The characters interact with each other and their situation in important ways. Florence Pugh is brilliant as Dani. She understands fully and embodies the emotions of her character, as she hangs on to the last thread of composure she can manage while combating the pain that comes with a stressed relationship and a breakup. Each emotion is visible as it bubbles below the surface or breaks out into wailing hysteria. We, as an audience, are with her every step of the way, even to the end of the film, with an ending that seems satisfyingly cathartic and therapeutic on a personal level for Dani. “Pugh is acting on a level that creates a psychological portrait, making every scene another facet into her character’s frame of mind” (Eggert).
Then we come to the male characters of the group of friends. They represent different facets and tendencies of both masculine inadequacy and dull modern tendency. It’s clear that Dani’s boyfriend Christian, played by Jack Reynor, is a coward and a selfish asshole from the get-go, even if Dani is too fragile to realize it. “Christian is also conflict-avoiding and seems incapable of making decisions for himself or imagining himself in anyone else’s shoes” (Wilkinson). Josh, an anthropology student doing his thesis on the Harga, is obsessed with European pagan traditions, to the extent where he’s fully embraced this cult in Sweden. He turns the village’s traditions and magic into an object for study, and puts morality aside in favor of academic ambition, ultimately bringing his demise. Mark, the true comedic archetype of the fool, thinks he’s the answer to Love Island Sweden, can’t stop vaping, making lewd comments about women and pissing all over everything. “In a sense, these characters represent corrupting, toxic masculinity” (Rose).
Aster brings to life a complex and delicately detailed community, where the haunting score originating from chantlike singing accompanies by animal-skin drums and violins pairs the light-haired men and women don angel-like whites, with runes stitched into them, to symbolize “nature’s hermaphroditic qualities” (Eggert). Their children are taught to carve rune stones, help prepare community meals, and sleep in shared spaced filled with murals of seduction, sexual intercourse, and bloody sacrifices.
Aster is careful to note, “This is not Swedish history. This is folklore.” Aster, along with Martin Karlgvist and Patrik Andersson came up with the concept of the Harga commune (Olsen). The belief system of the seemingly happy inhabitants of the Harga is a mix of European paganism, cult tradition, and arcane numerology. Most horrific events in the film are fiction but based on holidays and rituals that are very real. May Queens, maypoles and flower crowns are familiar elements of real-life midsummer rituals in Sweden. midsummer is an annual event that takes place in mid-June, around the summer solstice, and it’s popular throughout the globe, particularly Scandinavia. It’s briefly depicted in the Disney movie Frozen (Snyder).
The Harga’s split life into symbolic 18-year seasons: spring from birth to 18, summer from 18 to 36, fall from 36 to 54, and winter from 54 to 72, at which time you promptly die by tradition of the attestupa. Your work, activities, position in the commune, even where you sleep is dictated by your season. “They’ve developed a way of life that, through its rituals, ascribes a sacredness to every part of life, from birth to death – basically, the kind of religion less interested in deities than in worshipping the cycle of life itself” (Vox). Using the oversized mallet to finish the job when the elderly couple commits suicide by jumping off of the cliff has origins from Swedish customs. Simon in the chicken coop is based on legends of gory Norse practice called the “blood eagle”, a fate worse than death (Rose).
This film has multiple scenes where characters are experiencing the full body physical and mental experience that comes with ingesting psychedelic mushrooms, or psilocybin. Before the group even enters the gates of the main village, they drink the psychedelic tea, making their world become distorted and making them distrust their surroundings, even creating an even larger rift of miscommunication and emotional distance between Dani and Christian. The image of the film often warps, slightly, making our characters seem dazed and as though they are on their own separate trips for the duration of the film. Jack Reynor has said he has had his own share of psychedelic trips, and was able to accurately capture the spaced-out sensations in Christian. “Can you think of any film that you’ve watched that has as accurately represented the experience of a mushroom trip?” (Olsen). Aster said it was a long process of trial and error in the editing room to find the exact nuance of the visuals, and that they didn’t decide on a final version until a week before the release date. “There are some things we did in camera, but for the most part we had visual effect artists doing that in post,” he said. “I’m sure for some of those shots we got to the point where we had 60 versions. In one iteration the tripping was way too distracting and you’re not paying attention to the characters, and then you brought it down to the point where if you are paying attention to the characters, you’ll never notice the tripping effects” (Olsen).
The film’s use of psychedelic mushrooms in the character’s experience, and also as an additive to the horror elements, leads way to suggest multiple truths. For one, psychedelics can often be taken as a spiritual drug, connecting the user to the deepest parts of themselves, which can be terrifying. The visual effects that psychedelics bring can also be startling and hypnotizing. The use of psychedelics in recent years has become more common, catching conversation fires again with the published Johns Hopkins psilocybin (the ingredient in magic mushrooms) research program report, leading studies in treating depression, PTSD, and addition in healthy volunteers in 2000 (Jefferson). The fact that Aster has chosen to use psychedelics as a motif in his film means that they are becoming more common in pop culture and may continue to become more common after the film’s release and viewing. It’s a big move, considering psilocybin is a schedule one drug in the USA. But it’s a powerful move, because film and other forms of media portrayal of illegal substances can change public opinion on those substances, and public opinion can change the laws in a positive way.
Among many of the background details for viewers of the film to catch on are the murals, tapestries, and runic symbols all over the village and costumes of the characters – and forshadow many events in the film. One of the most important set pieces is the bunk house, a communal sleeping quarter, who’s inner walls are covered in elaborate murals painted by artist Ragner Persson and based on medieval art (Snyder). One example is the illustration of two people having sex, surrounded by onlookers, referring to the mating ritual between Christian and Maja. There is also an illustration of a bear burning alive, the very fate that Christian faced at the end of the film, while inside a disemboweled bear. Another illustration shows villagers cutting their hands in sacrifice, as depicted in the attestupa, where the elderly couple cut their palms atop the cliff, then jump to their deaths.
The work of costume designer Andrea Flesch’s distressingly repetitive, angelically Nordic-embroidered costumes tells the Harga villager’s story (Laffly). “Andrea ordered buttons from Sweden and antique linen sourced from Romania and Hungary. Many pieces were hand-embroidered, while others were painted or printed, with costumes used to signify different families and even different jobs within the community, such as servers and musicians. Each costume was given an individualistic runic symbol to identify characters” (Olsen).
Director Ari Aster gave each character a specific rune for their robes. Character Dani has an R rune on her dress, symbolizing a ride or journey, like coming to her own journey of coming to terms with the truth about her relationship. The hourglass shape next to her R symbolizes an awakening, referring to her moment of clarity about Christian. On Christian’s robes, ironically, have an arrow-up rune, referencing the male symbol or a willingness to self-sacrifice, a symbol he does not appear to have. Other symbols around the village include the dining table, a rune of tradition, a symbol which is shown upside down at the entrance gate to the village, and the X rune inside the sacred temple can mean gift, as the nine victims were a gift to the gods to cleans the commune of evil (Snyder).
The sex scene is significant in its symbolically quiet narration of switching of gender roles in the commune’s setting. Maja, a young girl, is the one who seduced Christian, a large, older male, in having sex with her by using magic rituals like baking her pubic hairs into a meat pie and putting her period blood in his drink. These were done to supposedly cast a spell on Christian, which led to one of the most disturbing sex scenes in film, where a drugged-out Christian is brought to have sex with the young woman in from of a chorus of chanting naked women. “The scene is unnerving and darkly funny, it’s intricate choreography akin to that of a musical number” (Olsen).
Actor Jack Reynor, playing Christian, said the scene brought a mix of emotions. He wanted to keep a positive attitude and help raise the spirits of the background players, none of whom spoke English, while also conveying empathy and understanding to young actress Isabelle Grill, who played Maja. All while grappling with his own feelings of vulnerability in shooting an intense scene completely naked – something that is usually experienced by women in horror films (Olsen).
Reynor describes his experience. “You don’t see that stuff happening to male actors in films very much,” said Reynor. “Although it’s not pitched at the same level of violence, it does flip that dynamic on its head a little bit, and it was an opportunity for me to experience something of that as a male actor. And to shoot a scene where I was going to have to be exposed — I advocated for as much full-frontal nudity as possible,” he added. “I really wanted to embrace the feeling of being exposed and the humiliation of this character. And I felt really, really vulnerable, more than I had actually even anticipated” (Olsen).
Midsommar is a powerful study of grief, betrayal, breakups. It might be the ultimate bad breakup movie, as the whole time seems to rely less on the festival horrors and moreso on the crumbling relationship between Dani and Christian (Eggert). We see how Christian is distancing himself from Dani, treating her with a painful indifference that severely cracks her emotions in her fragile state. “For me, the film is incidentally a folk horror film. If anything, this is my attempt at making a big operatic breakup move that feels the way a breakup feels,” said Aster (Olsen).
But an even larger idea inside the film is that of shared emotion, and the importance of finding a foundation of empathy, communication, and understanding to build a lasting relationship. “We as humans don’t want to feel isolated in either our joy or pain, and one of the greatest gifts a partner or family member can give us is to share in those emotions. To feel a little less alone” (Chitwood). Dani finds people, a community, who can help her carry the burdens of her grief and emotions, even though it had to come after her boyfriend is being burned alive inside a barn inside the literal carcass of a bear. The freedom she feels in the final shot is expressed by her smile and through her eyes, and it might even be therapeutic for you, too.
Ari Aster has beautifully crafted a piece of art through the medium of filmmaking, practically shaking the ground we stand on when we talk about horror, domestic relationships, and cultural folklore. He has begun to define a new way to think about what makes humans fear, what our core desires are, and what we need to reflect on in our own lives. From relationships to traditions to drugs, there is something to learn from Midsommar, a film about the rawness of human experience.
Works Cited
Chitwood, Adam. “'Midsommar' Ending Explained: We're All in This Together.” Collider, Collider, Inc., 30 Sept. 2019, collider.com/midsommar-ending-explained/#images.
Eggert, Brian. “Midsommar.” Deep Focus Review, Deep Focus Review, 3 July 2019, deepfocusreview.com/reviews/midsommar/.
Jefferson, Robin Seaton. “Magic Mushrooms As Medicine? Johns Hopkins Scientists Launch Center For Psychedelic Research. Say Psychedelics Could Treat Alzheimer's, Depression And Addiction.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 12 Sept. 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/robinseatonjefferson/2019/09/12/magic-mushrooms-as-medicine-johns-hopkins-scientists-launch-center-for-psychedelic-research-say-psychedelics-could-treat-alzheimers-depression-and-addiction/#15450a40c171.
Laffly, Tomris. “Midsommar Movie Review & Film Summary (2019): Roger Ebert.” RogerEbert.com, Eber Digital LLC, 1 July 2019, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/midsommar-2019.
Lopez, Kristen. “A Film Under the Influence: Gender, Homage And 'Midsommar'.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 1 July 2019, www.forbes.com/sites/kristenlopez/2019/07/01/a-film-under-the-influence-gender-homage-and-midsommar/#6dbf72ff77ee.
Olsen, Mark. “'Midsommar' Explained: The Filmmakers Unpack the Sex, Rituals and Shocking Ending.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 4 July 2019, www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-midsommar-spoilers-ari-aster-jack-reynor-20190703-story.html.
Rose, Steve. “Midsommar: What the Hell Just Happened? Discuss with Spoilers.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 8 July 2019, www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jul/08/midsommar-what-the-hell-just-happened-discuss-with-spoilers.
Snyder, Chris. “All the Hidden Meanings You May Have Missed in the 'Midsommar' Ending.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 8 July 2019, www.businessinsider.com/midsommar-ending-explained-hidden-meanings-symbols-clues-2019-7.
Wilkinson, Alissa. “Midsommar Is a Brutish, Nasty Daylight Nightmare from the Director of Hereditary.” Vox, Vox Media, 20 June 2019, www.vox.com/culture/2019/6/20/18691638/midsommar-review.
