‘Midsommar’ Critical Analysis.

 How has ritualistic and folk horror been represented in Ari Aster’s 2019 film ‘Midsommar’?

 What happens if you realize you are not a person existing in your own space with your own joys and trepidations, but rather just an ordinary corpse that serves as fuel for a harrowing cult indulging in quotidian sacrificial activities? This question, an appalling tap on the shoulders of conservatism, is the very first thing Ari Aster’s masterpiece of folk horror ‘Midsommar’ seems to ask.

Folk horror along with ritualistic horror is a genre that recently started gaining popularity among the movie fanatics. The simple reason being, the incidents depicted in these films don't appear to be something that can't happen in real life. As profound it is as petrifying, Midsommar immediately divulges into an environment of loss and grief while simultaneously dealing with a Scandinavian Pagan cult centering around summer solstice. Ari Aster very intricately weaves in the concept of losing one’s own identity into the movie mentioning the notion of submitting yourself completely to a sinister cult.

An important quality of Aster's work is how well he captures and develops the existential dread that pervades daily life in Midsommar. As a whole, it is depicted that humanity's insignificance is a source of unimaginable horror because we are not the center of the universe. There is a sense of futility and a belief that there is no God or afterlife.

  

 

Midsommar is a ritualistic and folk horror film that entails the archetypal plot development of films belonging to horror. The film creates a haunting atmosphere that is pertinent to fit a folk and ritualistic spectacle. It is imperative to note that the suspense is majorly used in the film to constantly capture the audience's attention, which is typical of horror movies. The scenes and cinematic effects resonate with those of a typical horror movie right from the time the audience is introduced to a traumatized Dani over the death of her parents and sister under mysterious fire. However, unlike the conventional ritualistic and folk horror film, the conflict that runs throughout the film is sustained through mise-en-scene and the cinematic effects to change the perspective of the audience.

 

 

 

The opening scene itself sets a melancholic and agonizing theme where a dark colored bedroom is featured, the site where both of the protagonist’s parents are killed and her sister is ferried inside the body bags. It is imperative to note that this is where the protagonist, Dani, first begins to lose her identity as fragments of her family’s existence starts to fade away.

Aster’s unconventional way of developing the lament of horror in his works; the director follows a relatively unique route by a type of casual horror. Aster focuses on developing terrors of grief, albeit with a supernatural twist. Aster’s focus on Dani develops the theme of odd rituals that take place on an annual basis. Dani epitomizes grief as she contends with the odd rituals following the demise of her parents and sister. This development creates the idea that Aster incorporated real rituals to make the events in the movie realistic.

 

The carnage in Midsommar is especially disturbing since its catalysis is a young white woman's journey from estrangement to belonging. The rituals that take place in the film are documented, and this creates a sense of authenticity of the horrific rituals and folklore that take place in the Swedish countryside. A relative number of the rituals that are evident in Midsommar are a grouping of myths, folklore, and documented customs. An excellent example is the Attestupa tradition, which emerges in the film as a way of the elderly giving way to the ‘circle of life’ by relieving the community of the burden to take care of them. This type of sacrifice was evident among the Siberian Chukchi. The ill and the aged expressed a wish to die as a way of relieving the family of the burden to take care of them. With these ideas, the audience starts developing the idea that Midsommar is more about the twisted stereotypes that people have developed regarding Scandinavia. The dancing and flower games are all fairly evident in Sweden and a larger part of Europe during the summer. However, these rituals seem to occur in brutal and fictional extremes throughout the movie. The tendency of connecting the peaceful Swedish culture with brutality leads people to portray the community through a lens of ritualistic and folk horror.

 This movie is not about feeding audience amusement by letting them indirectly partake in someone else's misery. In Midsommar, death is depicted the same way as the characters in the story treat it: neither as something to be shunned nor made into something spectacular.

  

 

Aster has called it a horror movie with a break-up narrative, and that's exactly what it is, but it is also a look at the complexities of loss, especially of individuality alongside others, as Dani's journey to Hårga becomes a deeper examination of the concepts of bereavement and existentialism. In the face of such devastating loss, Dani has lost essential parts of her identity, as both a sister and a daughter, and as a caregiver. When she sees a Swedish girl go by for sexual activity with her boyfriend, her relationship with Christian is teetering on the brink. Her anguish is free falling, and when the grass creeps under her feet when she dances to become May queen, she further loses her previous identity as she drops into the undergrowth.

 

The cult seems to punish all those who had committed wrongdoings against Dani in one way or the other and it ultimately seems to comfort her in the end as she is seen smiling. The way each of the characters are killed depicts the deeply hidden desires of Dani. Looking at the death of Simon, whom she was jealous of for treating Connie in ways Christian never would, whose killing was more of an examination done by Dani, his body dissected and cut open. While he had his arms stretched out in front of him, his eyes plucked out and substituted with flowers, and his lungs kept outside of his body by floral-decorated ropes, his body was in midair and facing downwards. This appears to be his sole wrongdoing in Dani's case, that his relationship with Connie had the potential to make her envious and push her to tackle the issues in her own relationship. Even though she clearly showed no interest in Connie, Simon's deliberate action toward her shows an analysis on Dani's part as to what makes Simon an appealing lover to Connie compared to what Christian was to her.

 

While Simon clearly bore the brunt of Dani's anger, Mark and Josh were dealt with punishments that were the equivalent of their respective offences against her in her breakdown. With the exceptions of Christian, Mark had directly caused the greatest pain to Dani in the film: encouraging Christian to break up with her and neglecting her completely, as well as never showing his sympathy to her after her family was murdered.

 

Midsommar creates the idea that the Swedes send people to make friends with people from other communities across the globe during the annual human sacrifice ritual. The recruits come back to Sweden with their newly-made friends to contribute to the word count. Aster’s somewhat casual horror creates this illusion fairly well by creating scenes that are relatively creepy and unsettling. The talent for manipulation and deception comes to the surface as the audience perceives how the perpetrators engage in the process of extensive planning before luring their victims to Sweden. These ideas create themes that depict Sweden as a place of cultic traditions, and the fact that Swedes are generally reserved when it comes to emotional interaction cements Aster’s themes. In this respect, the friendly Swedes that lure Americans to Sweden for the human sacrifice rituals create the notion that such rituals exist in Sweden. In a way, one can contend that Midsommar creates the idea that the Swedish community is one that embraces violence and horrific rituals and traditions.

 In conclusion, Midsommar portrays a new type of ritualistic and folk horror by reimagining those tranquil Swedish environments in a twisted and unsettling manner. Aster accomplishes this end by creating scenes that do not simply focus on jump scares; the film creates horror in a way that connects Swedish culture with horrific rituals and traditions. The human sacrifices and the tendency of the Swedes in the movie to lure people from other areas for human sacrifice makes the themes that the film appear real. Further, the rituals and traditions are premised on real, cultic activities of different cultural groups over the past years. The cultures of the British and the Germans are most evident in the film, but those of the Siberians are also perceivable. By developing this twisted perspective of the Scandinavians, Aster succeeds in creating an image of a society that readily embraces violence and horror.

Works Cited

Savage, Maddy. "This Might Be the Loneliest Country for Expats." Bbc.Com, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161005-this-might-be-the-loneliest-country-for-exp

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WILLERSLEV, RANE. "The Optimal Sacrifice: A Study of Voluntary Death Among the Siberian Chukchi." American Ethnologist, vol 36, no. 4, 2009, pp. 693-704. Wiley,

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01204.x.

Durie, Alexander. "Folk Horror, Female Talent on the Rise in Genre Filmmaking, Cannes

Discussion Fantastic 7 Hears." Variety, 13 July 2021,
variety.com/2021/film/global/folk-horror-female-talent-genre-filmmaking-cannes-1235018388/.

 Written By,
Faraz Ahmad Khan & Anusha Hasan