In interviews, 32-year-old horror auteur Ari Aster has praised a group of predictable influences on his uncanny approach to horror filmmaking, from provocateur directors like Roman Polanski (in the mode of Rosemary’s Baby and Repulsion) to Michael Haneke to Lars Von Trier. But a more unusual spiritual forebear for Aster is British filmmaker Mike Leigh, the revered specialist in kitchen-sink dramas and precisely researched 19th-century period pieces. “Leigh is an inspiration but not an influence,” Aster told Indiewire last year. “I go to his films just to remind myself what I want out of movies about people…and remember what it is that makes us care about any story in the first place — the people at the heart of it.”
Aster’s praise of Leigh gets at the most compelling connecting thread between the two tour de force features the young writer and director has released to date—last year’s chilling possession flick Hereditary and this month’s Midsommar, a cult horror epic about American graduate students visiting a Swedish midsummer celebration in a remote village. Unlike Hereditary, Midsommar is not built on a backbone of scares, and Aster himself has characterized it as “not overtly a horror movie.” But at the center of both films is a loving attention to character development. Just two years into his career, the director has already proven himself able to elicit rich, emotionally acute performances from his actors, and his writing for them goes well beyond the level of detail that even the most ambitious art-horror directors might consider necessary to their purpose. As in Leigh’s films, Aster spins familiar genre character types into fully formed personalities whose moment-to-moment struggles pull at the threads of our lived experience.
The emotional charge of Hereditary stems from two instances of traumatic loss, and is more devastating than Aster’s new film, but Midsommar’s dominant interpersonal drama feels immediately, painfully familiar. Despite the fact that the film also begins with grisly deaths in the family, the action ultimately centers around a simpler, less sensational scenario: a relationship between two twenty-somethings that is slowly crumbling. The persuasiveness of the embattled relationship between Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) becomes the key to everything in the film—the driving force behind the horror mythology. Though Midsommar often feels like an ensemble, the action is seen largely from Dani and Christian’s perspectives. Often, Christian’s callous miscalculations as he tries to string Dani along makes their interpersonal interactions feel almost as horrifying as the film’s most degenerate rituals. An argument over Christian planning the long trip to Sweden with his friends without alerting Dani is one of the movie’s most discomfiting moments, like a passive-aggressive, millennial update of the acidic atmosphere of Ingmar Bergman’s marriage films.


Also Read
Parker Posey: Gen X Marks the Spot
The outright horror action in Midsommar kicks into full gear once Dani and Christian’s unstable bond becomes a clear weakness that the eerily beaming Swedish revelers can exploit. Their psychological manipulations are facilitated by polite entreaties in cute broken English. They ply their American guests with a steady stream of hallucinogens, and Midsommar gradually reveals itself to be the most terrifyingly accurate film about psychedelic mushrooms ever produced. The dosing helps pulls the movie into a vortex of subjectivity. Haunted memories seep into the present and warp it, and supplication to even the most sadistic directive becomes impossible for the American intruders to resist. In this context, Aster’s eerie pastoral scenarios turn from Wicker Man fan fiction into something more depraved, and distinct to his sensibility.

As the film progresses, the story becomes increasingly Dani’s, which allows Aster to draw our sympathies increasingly toward the cult members, who support her in their own perverse way. Their deception and brutality arise from a shared ideology that is consistent, unmotivated by ego, and founded on generally egalitarian principles—particularly in regards to gender. Self-effacing and open to new answers, Dani finds her own kind of positive reinforcement within this framework. The inhabitants of the town seem to experience every emotion and physical sensation together, and help shoulder Dani’s grief and anger. In the face of this powerful communal energy, Aster shows Dani’s defenses come down, illustrating the change in her by focusing on the smallest details of Pugh’s face.
In Midsommar, Aster proves that his ability with actors and his thoughtful character writing is not only an incidental strength, but the source of the terror in his films. In thoughtfully framing his creepy, Jodorowsky-like ritual scenes around a simple central emotional conflict, he makes the interpersonal and transitional scenes that usually don’t work—even in very good horror movies—shine. Making logical leaps of faith is much easier; the graduate students’ ability to shrug off insane and unconscionable behavior feels plausible. Whereas Hereditary was a masterclass in throwing everything at the wall, cleverly flipping stock horror tropes, and eliciting visceral scares, the more protracted Midsommar is much less of a raw onslaught; it’s an exercise in doing more with less, which truly highlights the true source of Aster’s genius. The sinister action develops like watching an unholy coloring book being slowly filled in, with the devil’s limbs being shaded one by one. The experience is hypnotic and often joyful, and a journey that we take with Dani. The fact that we feel like we are sharing it with her is what distinguishes Midsommar as an exceptional cinematic achievement.