![]() ![]() What’s funny is the contrast between the Americans’ immediate, visceral revulsion and their hosts’ nonplussed good humor. ![]() No spoilers, unless you consider Newton’s laws of gravity to be a spoiler: The scene’s inevitable trajectory generates a uniquely deadpan sort of dread, perversely literalizing the idea of a “jump scare,” while all but daring us to look away. grad students who’ve decamped to Hälsingland in Sweden to attend a secretive summer solstice festival-observe a ceremony centered on the village’s two oldest inhabitants, who greet their peers from the top of a dizzyingly tall stone cliff. It happens near the midpoint of the movie, when the characters who serve as the film’s nominal heroes-a group of U.S. Midsommar has its own obscene Looney Tunes moment. Think about how Hereditary’s most shocking passage-if you’ve seen the movie, you know the one, it involves a speeding car and a highwayside telephone pole-is staged as a piece of abjectly vicious slapstick, unfathomable tragedy as a live-action Road Runner cartoon. One of Aster’s gifts is for conceiving sequences in which the terrible thing that’s happening is also hilarious. It’s about mixing tones at a molecular level. Nor is it a case of lapsing into full-on parody, as in Scream and its other late-’90s imitators. This is not the same thing as comic relief, like, for example, the Lil Rel Howery scenes in Get Out, which serve to break the tension at regular intervals (and to comment on the plot, Mystery Science Theatre 3000–style, on the audience’s behalf). Midsommar fulfills the true, literary definition of “grotesque,” which dictates that humor and horror, working in tandem, can heighten one another. In his savage New Yorker pan of Midsommar, Richard Brody called Aster’s movie “grotesque,” a put-down that is also apt enough. If Midsommar works-and that’s a big if-it’s because Aster is similarly committed to the dynamics of culture clash, as well as the possibility that scariness and satire are not exclusive. As with Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (another movie Aster has clearly absorbed), the relationship here to The Wicker Man is both superficial-Hippies! In frocks! Dancing!-and more thoughtfully wrought. The Wicker Man is a particularly inescapable reference point, even if the barrage of tweets calling Midsommar a rip-off after its trailer dropped were premature. 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. The key dichotomy in Midsommar’s network of contradictions is the one between humor and horror, which also informs many of the genre classics that Aster admires. That’s not necessarily a put-down: If one definition of vital genre filmmaking is that it discombobulates our responses, then Midsommar-alternately solemn and funny, as well as precise and sprawling, gory and boring, predictable and startling, derivative and strikingly original-is the equivalent of a hand-stitched “Mission: Accomplished” banner spelled out in runic alphabet. The similarities are clear, and if anything, Midsommar is even more likely to frustrate and even infuriate viewers than its predecessor-including, I’m guessing, more than a few who were able to get on Hereditary’s wavelength. The short gap between Hereditary and Midsommar probably accounts for some of their narrative and thematic overlap. Hereditary’s happy-unhappy ending is also a beginning: Its closing image suggests someone coming into his own. Despite the fact that, at the moment of truth, Aster bent the knee to Roman Polanski (specifically, the paranoiac, all-of-them-witches ending of Rosemary’s Baby), the triumphal tableaux of a kid being crowned king of his own private cult could also be taken, however coincidentally, as a bit of self-portraiture. The climax in particular cinched the idea of an emergent genre specialist. ( The Ringer’s Rob Harvilla got scared just skimming the Wikipedia plot summary.) A critical hit that alienated a fair chunk of the mainstream audience lured to the theater by all those good reviews (and that nevertheless earned $80 million worldwide on a $9 million budget), Hereditary’s juxtaposition of recognizable domestic tensions with hallucinatory freakouts and go-for-the-jugular gore suggested the arrival of a ruthless new horror movie talent. The 32-year-old writer-director got a lot of hype-and a little backlash-for his debut feature, Hereditary, a family (psycho)drama threaded like razor wire through the tropes of a supernatural thriller.
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