If I say “pagan horror cinema” to you, dear film viewer, and it doesn’t automatically raise the specter of The Wicker Man, I am not sure that you are operating on writer-director Ari Aster’s wavelength, nor, I think, within his intended audience. That cinematic relationship is both the film’s personal test and its cruel inheritance, a horror lineage that bestows a queasy moral vista that the film very evidently wishes to surpass. The schematic reading of any pagan horror film (which is to say, films hardly trying to hide their indebtedness to The Wicker Man) is that they allegorize the dormant aftershocks of Paganism on modern Christianity, typically coding the latter as individualistic and civilization and the former as communal and essentially transgressive in its refusal of modern liberal norms. And, inevitably, they tend to find the latter mortally terrifying, especially when the pagan religion is, gasp, lead by women rather than men.

Films in this mode partially relieve the moral dubiousness of meditating on the supremacy of the modern West by only explicitly comparing it to essentially European pasts (otherwise, Midsommar bears an unmistakable ideological kinship with Eli Roth’s ludicrously racist Green Inferno, even if they are aesthetic and affective polarities). But while this blunts Midsommar’s immediate sense of ethical indiscretion, the film’s vestiges of more overtly Eurocentric visions are still readily apparent. Midsommar tests itself against The Wicker Man by upending and disfiguring the original film’s obviously dubious gender politics and skepticism about communal life, but, as I wrote above, it also inherits a debt that it can’t fully break from. Midsommar would dearly like us to know that it is skeptical of modern Western social forms, more overtly so than The Wicker Man or most pagan horror films, but that doesn’t overtake the slow-creeping terror with which it treats the non-individualistic Western past.

So that’s dubious enough, but it’s a horror conceit, and one which has served as scaffolding for masterpieces as well as well as detritus. But rather than treating this as a conceit upon which he could fashion a primordial uncanniness, Aster keeps rubbing salt on the wound, picking up and putting on themes that don’t give as much as the film gives them. Aster picks and picks at the already bitterly scabbed-over holes opened by his previous film, 2018’s phenomenally doleful Hereditary. And not always to this new film’s benefit; its attempts to dive into the implications of its politics sometimes only clarify the limits of its moral vista, the tensions of its attempt to combine good old-fashioned cult horror and the modern trauma-metaphor Elevated Horror which was a much snugger fit for his previous film.

In a sense, Midsommar succumbs to a classic second-film curse. It is a bigger, wider, more expansive canvas than that earlier film, a sun-blighted void where the first film was a cloistered, choking vise. It tries to rope in everything it can, taking what could be a primal fable of existential loneliness and erecting a veritable phalanx of themes and concerns, complicating and bending the tortured weave of his previous film. And it begins where that earlier work ended, with one of Western society’s foundational “units,” the family, in a hopeless free-fall.

This film opens on Dani (Florence Pugh) calling her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), busy being relatively indifferent to her personal difficulties as he hangs out with his friends and fellow Anthropology PhD students, Josh (William Jackson Harper), Pelle (Vilhelm Blogren), and Mark (Will Poulter). The subject of her call is a recent email by her sister, still living at home with their parents and despondently depressed, hinting obliquely that she doesn’t know if she can continue on. Christian is dismissive, and when Dani calls back, her entire family is dead. Six months later, the relationship has stalled out, and Christian pity-invites Dani on a two-week trip to Pelle’s native Sweden for the Midsommar festival, having initially planned not to tell her about it. Upon arrival, Dani is obviously distraught, a situation only exacerbated (but also alleviated) by the increasingly disturbing contours of the festival, where a young woman seems to have desires for Christian, villagers (including empathetic Pelle) seem smitten with Dani, a few other visitors disappear under mysterious circumstances, and an elderly couple is forced into ritualistic suicide as part of the every-90-years’ festivities of the community’s Midsommar festival.

Aster’s first film devoured the soul of Western society’s de facto unit – the nuclear family – and exposed the lesions that may make that unit far less natural than it seems in doing so. Midsommar wants to complicate things even further. On one hand, Midsommar also wants to deconstruct the notion of the heterosexual couple. Perhaps more importantly, it provides an alternative vision of family life to counter the rotting corpse Hereditary left in its wake – it gives us a communal vision of paganism as a rebuke, a past which could prove less a dangerous, festering wound than a portal to a new world for Dani, who clearly doesn’t have much use for this world at the moment.

But this is horror, of course, so pagans can’t but be treated skeptically, as a moment of dangerous possibility that must be foreclosed. Midsommar vaguely offers a suggestion that the coercive, totalitarian worldview of the Swedish commune is perhaps more ethical, and as importantly, more livable, than the emotional centrifuge of Western society where place and purpose are increasingly unstable and emotional connections ever more tenuous. Pelle soon emerges as an alternative suitor for Dani, and the commune soon mutates into an alternative family, one where the interpersonal wreckage of Western society is implicitly assumed to be absent, or at least withheld, buried beneath layers of social control.

In this sense, Midsommar offers the hope of anti-modernism as a means of personal transcendence. To this extent, the film freights its concerns even further by considering Western gender relations as well. The four men play the adventure as an excuse for a moral escape, using another culture as a means for sexual fulfillment. It chastises Western youths for their academic appreciation of a worldview that toys with the lives of the commune and threatens their own. This Midsommar, then, is more conspicuously acclimatized to the toxicity of The Wicker Man’s gender dynamics, but that neither makes this new film intrinsically good nor means that the relationship considerations belong in this film, a work that doesn’t so much weave its themes together as trot each of them out on an as-needed basis. To wit: its critique of Western society can’t mask how skeptical it is of alternative societies. Whatever paganism offers Dani, one gets the sense that Aster is a cynic who doesn’t have an alternative to really believe in.

Midsommar’s vision of Western relationships – the fear of personal abandonment and, worse, existential loneliness are central features  –  is more nuanced than its view of the pagan cult, admittedly. It can also sometimes feel grafted out of another film, though, as well as unable to overcome its very normative schematization of the non-committal man and the demanding, dependent, emotionally unstable woman. One could say that the film is valuable because it refuses to domesticate its differences – it absolutely does not offer a way out of this conundrum for us, or for anyone – and that it thereby compromises the Western fantasy of universality by reminding us of something like our sheer historical difference from the culture that is being depicted. But there’s little sense of the difference being meaningfully historical at all in this film, just a cudgel to beat each character with, a means to nihilistically offer a nothingness from which they have no hope of recovering. It ultimately treats paganism through a lens of anachronism rather than alterity, as a past to fear rather than a difference to consider or ruminate on. 

Still, Aster’s formal acumen is almost unsurpassable. Even if some of his gestures seem more like aesthetic adornments than thematic embellishments, they hit right in the gut. His canny manipulation of cinematic time, stretching shots ad infinitum and then violently editing to squish time, is masterful. The film features one of its drollest, most curdled edits of the year, the film lurching suddenly from slow-drip serenity to nerve-jangling disfigurement entangled in blackly comic absurdity. Pawel Pogorzelski’s sun-scorched cinematography inescapably inverts the genre’s template of malevolent chiaroscuro, and more specifically upends Hereditary’s cloistered domestic nightmare, making a one-film argument for the possibility of a horror cinema completely uncoupled from German expressionism’s shadowy sensibility and film noir’s nighttime rot. Would that Midsommar had been a more fitting use of that skill, but that doesn’t diminish the power of Aster’s craft, nor Midsommar’s sometimes cruel capability and perverse playing with both physical and mental space.

Score: 6/10