Today is the solstice and I think it's the perfect occasion to remember the horror film Midsommer by A24 and the talented director Ari Aster, which can be safely classified as a new genre classic.
Unfortunately I missed it in the cinema, but I was patient enough to watch the extended director's version at home and was very impressed with what I saw.
Deni (Florence Pugh) suffered a terrible tragedy when her sister, who suffers from bipolar disorder, killed herself and her parents on Christmas Day.
A few months after this terrible event, her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Raynor), offers her a change of scenery and invites her to go with his anthropologist friends to Sweden, where an amazing and unusual summer solstice celebration takes place in the remote Harga commune.
The girl agrees, but has no idea what a nightmare this trip will turn out to be for them.
Ari Aster, recently the author of very strange, sharp social short films, performed brilliantly in 2018 with the dark occult horror film Hereditary and has established himself as no less important to the horror genre than Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) and Robert Eggers (The Witch) and, naturally, few expected his new film to turn out to be a black comedy about a painful relationship wrapped in a creepy thriller a la Robin Hardy's classic The Wicker Man.
No, from a certain angle, Midsommar is still a horror film, with all the necessary trappings - blood, violence, brutal murders, strange sectarians with their own norms of life, sawing off tourist guests one by one... True, unlike most representatives of the genre, everything happens not in the darkness of the night, but in the bright summer sun, on the green-green meadows. And to the roundels or authentic Scandinavian folk. It surprises and scares the hell out of me in places, but, most importantly, immerses me in the pagan world of the film, where even fleetingly shown pictures on the walls and canvases with embroidery foretell further events.
Certainly these pictures and frescoes are a marvelous directorial feat, and on the subject of hidden symbols in Solstice, Astaire reaches a whole new level for himself. The picture of the girl and the bear from a Swedish fairy tale, the stylized "traditional" pictures depicting Hargi rituals, the Red Eagle from Viking myths, and the creepy "comic book" about female enchantment are easily mixed in with references to Stanley Kubrick's iconic The Shining. The heroine's name, the spectacular camera flip at the beginning of the journey, the quilt with a pattern copying the floor of the Overlook Hotel, and finally the book with caricature runes as a bold allusion to Jack Torrence's story.
Thanks to the film's measured pace and the fantastic work of cameraman Pavel Pogorzhelski, a master of long shots, you don't have to make any special effort to see everything properly, which makes the film even more expansive and deep, and Astaire's specific humor even clearer.
Whether or not to see "Solstice" is up to you. For a bloody horror, it's too clever, and for a black comedy about relationships, it's very simple and straightforward, but at the same time has far more than one point of intersection with the work of the acknowledged master of shocking content, the scandalous Lars von Trier.
8 out of 10
P.S. one of the official posters of the film, stylized as a summer festival poster :)
