1.Prologue
Watching movies—especially Hollywood movies—is often an escape from reality. Movies invite us into the world of the extraordinary, or an alternate ordinary, allowing us to leave work and household troubles, interpersonal difficulties, and the complexity of daily life behind.
A good horror movie does the opposite: it seemingly invites us into the world of the extraordinary, but is actually leading us straight back to the troubles and fears what we go out of our way to ignore in our day-to-day lives. All of the ghouls and spirits and killers are stand-ins for human anxieties and societal fears.
Ari Aster’s feature length debut, Hereditary, is exactly that—a nightmarish movie that punishes you for assuming you know how the story will unfold, or that you are “safe" in the director’s hands. Annie Graham, a miniatures artist living in Utah with her family, begins to attend group therapy after her estranged mother passes away. There, she reveals to the group that mental illness runs in her family: her mother had dissociative identity disorder, her brother committed suicide after battling with schizophrenia, and Annie sleepwalks. She attempts to leave the past behind her and move on, but when her two children begin exhibiting signs of mental illness, she begins a descent into her greatest nightmare. The central themes of Hereditary are dysfunctional families and the genetic inheritance of mental illness.
Aster’s second feature-length film, Midsommar, is about toxic relationships and the arrogance of American male-dominated society. American college student Dani and her feckless boyfriend Christian are on the cusp of breaking up until Dani loses her parents and her younger sister in a horrible tragedy. Dani, in a state of shock, clings to Christian for support, but he has already checked out of the relationship; Christian himself is now in a position where he cannot bring himself to break up with her. Needing time away, he secretly plans a trip with his guy friends to the Swedish countryside to experience a local midsummer festival, but when Dani finds about the plan he reluctantly invites her along. The group travels to the village of Hårga, an Eden-like paradise touched by the midnight sun where the villagers all dress alike and lead an idyllic lifestyle. They are welcomed with smiles, given food and a place to sleep, but as the summer festival begins, they soon find themselves in a waking nightmare.
In this review, I will take an in-depth look at the main themes of Midsommar.
2.A Fairy Tale About Grief and Toxic Relationships
Midsommar, ostensibly a horror film, begins with a folksy mural that feels like a storybook beginning to a Disney animated film. At first glance, it appears to be a mystical illustration showing the changing of the seasons from winter to summer. Upon closer look, we realize it is a fairy tale depicting our protagonist’s journey. She is drowning in the darkness at first, but sheds the wicked spirits in her life and is ultimately reborn.
At the beginning of the film, the protagonist, Dani, loses her parents and younger sister to an unspeakable tragedy, and is rendered despondent. She turns to her boyfriend Christian for comfort, oblivious to the fact—or more likely, not in the mental space to care—that he has been seriously considering breaking up with her for some time now. Christian, not wanting to be “that guy”, half-heartedly consoles her as he continues to grow emotionally distant.
One night months later, Dani decides to tag along and go with Christian to a party, where she finds out that he and his guy friends are planning to go on a trip to Sweden in just a couple of weeks. Dani gently confronts Christian for an explanation when they get home, but unable to see that he’s done anything wrong, he gets defensive. They teeter on the edge of an argument for a moment before Dani, afraid of driving him away, starts apologizing and saying that she was in the wrong. Ultimately, Christian, not wanting to be seen as “that guy”, invites Dani along for the trip, to the chagrin of his friends.
In the U.S. this kind of relationship is increasingly being referred to as a toxic relationship—meaning that it is corrosive and damaging to one or both parties. The term can be applied to all relationships, not just romantic ones. Usually, one or both parties are aware on some level that they need to break it off, but find themselves needlessly prolonging the relationship because of convenience...or inconvenience. Unlike a more overtly abusive relationship that involves physical violence or psychological abuse, toxic relationships usually involve passive-aggressive behavior and the tendency to deny or put down the other person. Instead of being based on mutual trust, the relationship has become a tenuous link between two people more focused on their own interests.
The prevalence of toxic relationships has become an especially widespread problem in modern society. Tools like social media and smartphones have put the world at our fingertips, and as a result we’ve become self-centered, isolated, and unable to put ourselves in others’ shoes. We end up hurting the people in our lives while our interpersonal bonds gradually wither and die.
Dani and Christian’s relationship is doomed from the start; thankfully for Dani, vacations tend to inspire or accelerate major life changes. Their destination, Hårga, is an idyllic place that feels like it came straight out of a fairy tale. They enter the village by passing through a kind of heavenly gate, and are welcomed by smiling villagers wearing flowers and all white. They find out that the villagers all sleep under the same roof and eat meals together—they are a family that puts the will of the collective over the will of the individual. They follow pagan traditions, revering an oracle conceived through incest, believing in love spells, and liberally taking hallucinogenic drugs. For their midsummer festival, held once every 90 years, they perform a number of different rituals, including putting up a maypole in the middle of a field around which the villagers sing and dance. A hippie from 1960s America would feel right at home.
It is at this commune that Dani finally begins her grieving process, and is ultimately reborn. When she first arrives, she is given and peer-pressured into taking psychedelic mushrooms. Her resulting trip is an unpleasant and jarring experience that brings to the surface the feelings of loneliness and fear that she had been allowing to fester inside of her. The first ritual of the festival is Ättestupa, where the villagers congregate in front of a high cliff, and members who have reached the age of 72 leap to their deaths. As the initial shock wears off, Dani is forced to confront death—more specifically, the death of her parents and sister. And under the blinding midnight sun, there’s nowhere she can hide from her trauma.
As the midsummer festival goes on, Dani gradually reconnects with her emotions and the world around her. She finds that the villagers experience joy as one, and experience pain as one as well—a communal catharsis that means you are never alone. Finally accepting the fact that Christian is not her rock, Dani instead gains a new family in the villagers. And ultimately, that family helps her cast away the darkness and the wicked spirits that have been eating away at her soul.
3.A Psychedelic Descent into Folk Horror
While Dani’s character arc is a fairy tale, her boyfriend Christian and his friends Josh and Mark are stuck in a folk horror movie that punishes their arrogance and self-centeredness.
Ari Aster has said in interviews that he was initially approached by a Swedish production company to make a folk horror flick where a group of Americans travel to Sweden and are killed off one by one.
Folk horror is a genre heavily connected to English folklore, usually involving remote, isolated villages that continue to practice some combination of nature worship—animism, paganism—and reverence of the supernatural (what’s called the occult). The focus is on fostering a disturbing atmosphere rather than shocking viewers with gory killings. To put in another way, they deal with Westerners’ fear of savagery, the unknown, and the alien. One of the best-known films of the genre is 1973’s The Wicker Man.
The “unsuspecting Americans travel to a foreign land only to be picked off one by one" trope is a common one in horror films, especially the films of Eli Roth, the director of Hostel. In American horror films, the scares are usually less about atmosphere and more about gruesome scenes of murder. A film like Hostel is, on one level, all gore and guts, but there is also a perverse pleasure in seeing ignorant, arrogant American travelers getting punished for their lack of respect for other cultures. Midsommar combines elements of both of these two horror subgenres.
Christian, Josh, and Mark are traveling to Sweden because they have been invited by their Swedish exchange student friend Pelle to attend the midsummer celebration in his ancestral commune. The trip is not purely for pleasure: Christian and Josh are anthropology graduate students. Christian is adrift and undecided on a thesis project, while Josh is writing his thesis on European midsummer traditions and intends to include the Hårga. After witnessing the Ättestupa ritual, Christian suddenly decides that he wants to write his thesis on the Hårga as well—creating a rift between him and Josh. (The irony of a man named Christian writing his thesis on a pagan community—it’s a wonder he doesn’t instantly burst into flames.) The idea that their friendship would break down over something like a thesis project is comical, but it also shows how fragile their egos are. They have little genuine interest in truly understanding the Hårga culture, and see it as nothing more than a dominion for them to conquer on their quest for academic recognition.
Mark, the bro of the group, is just in it for the drugs and the chance to score with hot Swedish babes. Crude and dickish, he barely makes an effort to learn about the commune’s rules, and ends up committing a fatal cultural faux pas. No surprise—in this age of political correctness, nothing sends a shudder down our collective spine like cultural insensitivity. Even Christian and Josh put down their research for a moment to give him “bro, not cool" looks.
From the get-go, the trio doesn’t hesitate to partake in the commune’s drugs. But instead of becoming one with the universe, they find themselves turning inward, becoming increasingly paranoid about the reality around them. While Dani’s soul is gradually set free, the boys gradually lose self-control, and are ultimately rendered powerless. And as mandated by the horror genre, they are punished according to the commune’s rules. Aster is looking to show more than American egos and the arrogance of male-dominated society—he taps into the American fear of losing one’s sense of self and identity as a result of mind-expanding drugs or experiences (such as traveling to or learning about other cultures). It’s the fear of the foreign, or the unknown.
4.Allegory and Horror in Abe Kobo’s Woman in the Dunes
In my interview with Ari Aster for Sekai e Hasshin! SNS Eigojutsu on NHK E-Tele, he talked about his love for Japanese horror films and Japanese cinema in general. For Midsommar, he especially took inspiration from Imamura Shohei’s 1968 film Profound Desire of the Gods. Set on a remote island isolated from civilization, the film depicts the islanders’ folk traditions and superstitious beliefs clashing with the modern ways of a Tokyo engineer sent there to supervise the digging of a new well. The film mentions the custom of forcing pregnant women to jump off high cliffs—a way to lessen the strain in remote rural villages that only had limited resources. Imamura traversed similar territory in his 1983 film The Ballad of Narayama, a story about Ubasute-yama, a folktale and possibly mythical practice of carrying one’s elderly parents into the mountains to die.
When I came out of Midsommar, the first movie that came to mind was Teshigahara Hiroshi’s 1964 film Woman in the Dunes (adapted from Abe Kobo’s 1963 novel in a screenplay written by Abe himself). Woman in the Dunes, like Midsommar, mixes allegory with horror elements, and is both grounded in reality but also very surreal. While not technically a horror film, it is a nightmarish depiction—largely set in daylight—of a city dweller’s descent into madness in a remote village in the sand dunes. There is a sense of dread from beginning to end, and the viewer is forced to confront the anxieties and fears of modern society. When I asked Aster if he was familiar with the film, he answered that both the film and the novel were a couple of his favorites, and that he had been greatly influenced by them.
The protagonist of Woman in the Dunes is a prideful city-dweller. In the initial sequence after he arrives at the sand dunes, he comes across an insect crawling out of the sand; the man pokes at the bug, laughing cruelly to himself as it struggles to evade his grasp. It is also obvious from the beginning that the man looks down on the rural villagers. When the widow tries to explain to him about the nature of the sand, he scoffs at her and mansplains the properties of sand. And he continues to hold onto the hope that someone will come looking for him—after all, he’s a city-dweller—but no one ever does. Ultimately, the man is rendered helpless by the power of the sand.
At the same time, Woman in the Dunes is also a fantasy about running away. Although the man maintains that someone will surely come looking for him, we find out later that he has told no one about where he was heading—not his company, not his friends, and not even his wife. He has essentially run away from the emptiness of city life, from the mindless work and obligations, from the identity afforded him through the innumerable identification cards and certificates and paperwork that bears his name.
Abe’s original novel was released in 1962, right around the time that a disturbing trend was turning into a major social issue: people running away from home or deliberately vanishing to get away from family or marriage trouble, poverty, work problems, and other toxic relationships. In particular, the cases where there was no clear motive were referred to as johatsu (evaporated people). The protagonist of Woman in the Dunes is one such case—the chronicle of a man who runs away and finds a new family and new purpose (to dig for the village) at the bottom of a sand pit.
5.The Relationship Between Individuality and Society in America vs. in Japan
Ultimately, both Midsommar and Woman in the Dunes are about a protagonist who has lost touch with reality and their reason for living. Through a series of extraordinary experiences that protagonist goes through at a remote, isolated village location, they are able to find what they had been missing, and free themselves from the shackles of their past. At the same time, the way the two films approach the human ego and reason for living, as well as their depiction of the village, demonstrate the societal differences between the U.S. and Japan.
Midsommar, for example, takes the worldview that places the individual at the center, around which family, friends, and the community revolves. Dani finds herself a new family in a remote village in Sweden, but she does not serve the commune so much as the commune serves as the source of healing that she needs to overcome her grief and loneliness.
In Woman in the Dunes, the village is at the center, around which the individual revolves. At the beginning of the story, the man is obsessed with finding a new species of beetle so that he can leave his mark on the world. But by the end of the story, he has developed a way to extract water from the sand, and more than anything he can’t wait to share his discovery with his fellow villagers. The man exists in the service of the village and the widow, and his own individual identity is not so important. It’s no coincidence that the man’s name does not appear in the actual text of the story.
In fact, most of Abe’s protagonists lack a name. This idea of anonymity is at the very core of the Japanese identity, which is one that values family or the collective over the individual. While Westerners seek to leave a personal legacy behind, the Japanese celebrate the lives of anonymous everyday people. This is at the heart of Yanagita Kunio’s concept of minzokugaku (folk studies). Today, while charismatic entrepreneurs head Western companies, in Japan, it is the companies themselves that get the most attention.
In recent years, while the push for diversity has come to enrich and enliven our societies, there has been an equally potent pushback defined by tribalism—people grouping up with those that share their opinions, beliefs, and values. Those who do not are either rejected or labeled as the enemy. The trend has created conflict within societies as well as between them.
Both Midsommar and Woman in the Dunes also depict the cruelty of village societies. The villagers in Woman in the Dunes don’t care about anybody outside of their social circle. They earn the bulk of their income from selling the sand they dig up to construction companies, which in turn mix the sand into their cement in order to reduce costs. When the man learns of this, he argues that that is illegal, but the woman replies, “Who cares about happens to strangers?" The insularity and closed nature of the Japanese village society means that the inhabitants lack empathy for those outside of the village.
The commune in Midsommar is closed in a different way. The members are all white, and it’s no coincidence that every person of color in the film is killed off or sacrificed. Meanwhile, Dani, a white woman, is accepted into their family. Of course, that being said, even Dani must give up her coveted individuality in order to be accepted into the family. In a scene in the second half of the film, Dani appears in a dress of flowers that covers her entire body except for her face. In other words, she has become one with the commune (and with nature). The idea is that village societies deny the diversity of the individual. For Americans, that might be the scariest thing.
