Ari Aster’s Midsommar

BY: Katherine Sloan

Ari Aster’s upcoming Midsommar looks, solely from the trailer, like an offbeat homage to certain cult classics that examine pagan and cult-like behavior such as Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) starring Britt Ekland and Christopher Lee or even Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). Even though Russell’s The Devils is about the oppressive Catholic Church, there are scenes with Vanessa Redgrave where her extremely long red hair is uncovered by a nun’s habit that definitely could have lent inspiration to the aesthetics in Aster’s Midsommar. As Redgrave is sexually obsessed with Oliver Reed (whom she sees as a Christ-like figure) and even has fantasies of seducing him, it’s a meditation on what happens when people are, let’s say, brainwashed.

The premise of Midsommar seems a bit similar: It investigates wicked cult-like behavior as it depicts the story of a young couple who travel to a fabled midsummer festival in Sweden where everything looks gorgeous and bucolic complete with blonde women wearing garlands atop their heads while holding hands, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a maypole somewhere. The only problem is that things are, of course, most definitely not what they seem. The film stars the young and beautiful English starlet Florence Pugh (she won the British Independent Film Award for Best Actress in her role as Lady Macbeth) so she’ll definitely supply moviegoers with eye candy as the horror unfolds.

We’ll have to wait and see what actually happens in Midsommar that makes it so horrifyingly strange, but from the trailer and the director’s resume—his last film was 2018’s spooky hit Hereditary starring Toni Collette—it looks like we’re in for a sexually deviant, scarier version of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village (2004) or even something conjured from the mind of Lars von Trier. With deformed characters and images of the leading lady shrieking in terror, this doesn’t look like a film for the faint of heart. Hopefully Midsommar will resonate deeply with people and teach a lesson or two (I’m reminded of Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story The Lottery—an unflinching look at what happens to a town consumed by archaic tradition). If not, it’ll surely be a summer movie audiences won’t soon forget.