DOUBLE FEATURE 09.04.20
Midsommar + Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
“Holy shit. That was some of the most atrociously disturbing imagery I’ve ever seen on film.” This quote refers to Midsommar, Ari Aster’s 2019 thriller about a group of Americans who, upon traveling to a remote village in Sweden, unwittingly find themselves living among a cult on the eve of a pagan festival that occurs every ninety years. The quote could go either way: as a compliment or a “swim at your own risk” warning. Considering the words come from Jordan Peele, the undisputed master of the contemporary thriller, it can only be an endorsement.
Midsommar loosely adheres to the blueprint of the 1973 folk-horror film The Wicker Man, about a police investigator beckoned to the remote Scottish island of Summerisle (note the reference) and ends up the sacrificial lamb in a pagan ritual. Add a hefty dose of gore a la Hostel, and we have Midsommar, a smart, meticulously calculated horror film that, like its predecessor, drops clues within its first minutes. The hints refer to the fates of the hapless protagonists and, from then on, satisfactorily hits every trope of the genre in unique, “atrociously disturbing” fashion. Word to the wise — watch Midsommar during the day and, yeah, don’t drink the punch.
Once Upon A Time. Few phrases are as ingrained in the history of storytelling as these four words. Likely the very first story any child hears begins with them. When “once upon a time…” begins a narrative, we reflexively know something about what we are about to hear, read or see. It will be a retelling of events in the past, often with a fictionally embellished twist. Thanks to Sergio Leone, when a film includes the phrase in its title, there is an additional connotation — the film will fall in the western genre. One of the central tropes of the western is that it is about the end of an era. With his Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino delivers on every level. Set in California (the West) at the tail-end of the 1960s, a turning point in Hollywood when the then-archetypal notions of the leading man (embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio’s character) were being phased out (end of an era), Once Upon A Time In… Hollywood simultaneously retells one of the most notorious events in American history, the Manson murders. What makes Once Upon A Time… Hollywood, a fairy-tale is Tarantino’s reimagining: What if the Manson girls didn’t make it to Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s home, scrapped their original plans and ended up fucking with the wrong dudes. The result is immensely satisfying to behold and profoundly sad, as there is no escaping the reality of how things turned out.
