Stars: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Will Poulter
Director: Ari Aster
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
I oftentimes get the question "what is your favorite genre of film?" which I don't love (because all genres can be good or bad), but I think that most of the time when people ask this question, they are using it as code for "do you like horror or not?" Horror is the most polarizing genre of cinema, either getting people super excited or causing nervous hives. I am somewhere in the middle-as I said, I have a taste for every genre, but as I live alone in a relatively large house, I do in fact have to be a bit careful about what kinds of horror I watch (I don't like to watch a slasher film and then spend the first twenty minutes I get home walking around with a hammer opening closets). But Hereditary was a movie last year that I named as one of my Top 5 favorite pictures, and I couldn't ignore such a quick follow-up from inaugural director Ari Aster, particularly a movie that features Florence Pugh (so breathtaking in Lady Macbeth two years back). What I found was a flick that was billed as a horror, but felt cerebral, more like a slow decay than an actual, proper horror. It's a movie that's hard to categorize, to say the least, but let's give it a shot.(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Dani (Pugh), who has recently suffered an unspeakable tragedy on the eve of what looked like a probable breakup with her boyfriend Christian (Reynor). Her sister has committed suicide through carbon monoxide poisoning, but in the process has murdered her parents, essentially making Dani overnight an orphan, and forcing Christian to postpone their breakup. He's still planning on doing it, though, and seems inclined to let distance be the key to their undoing, as he's accepted an opportunity to go to the home of his friend Pelle (Blomgren), along with his buddies Mark (Poulter) and Josh (Harper), the latter of whom wants to write about Pelle's isolated Swedish commune culture for a thesis. Once they get there, they find a "free love" style community, isolated from all civilization, and slowly begin to see that this is hardly a utopia, but instead a violent cult under the guise of a flower child demeanor. We see them indulge in ritual suicide, and slowly but steadily the six outsiders (Christian and his friends, as well as another two British hangers-on that accompanied a different member here) start to disappear. All-the-while, Dani is becoming more and more enmeshed in the culture itself, eventually finding herself the "May Queen" in a horrifying final act of the film.
The crux of the movie is whether or not you hate Christian enough by the end of the movie to see him deserve the death he's going to get. Like Aster's last picture, Hereditary is not shy on violence (there are scenes of disemboweled bodies, crushed skulls, and skinned bears), but its most damning aspects are psychological. The film proves to clearly be on Dani's side, and while this might mark me as kind of a scrub (or someone who is distracted by how hot Jack Reynor is) I didn't side with her with such an extreme punishment. Sure, her boyfriend was a tool for not breaking up with her when he clearly didn't have any interest in her, seeing himself as doing her a favor by staying with her long before her tragedy, but the film's ending has Dani, betrayed by a drugged Christian having sex with a random woman on the commune who seems to like his sperm (and wants it before he gets burned alive), essentially giving herself completely over to the commune and its cultures, having lost her mind from Stockholm Syndrome. She seems happy that she's destroyed the final link she has to the outside world, and is ready to give herself over to this new life, but in a perverted twist of the beginning of the story, she's killed someone she loves as she's essentially ended her own life (she'll never escape this place), just like her sister, but taken others who trusted her down with her.
The movie is ambitious, and it almost works, but it stretches at places and doesn't have enough snap to some of the biggest reveals to make them hard to see coming (there might be surprises in how grotesque things can become, but it ends roughly where you'd expect it ending from the moment they fly to Sweden). The film feels like the type that a director, fresh off of his critically successful first movie, makes where he's clearly got a immense amount of talent, but no one around him to say "no" or "this is too hazy." He's got great instincts in casting-Pugh is excellent as Dani, trying to find an inner-rage and inner-struggle that is rarely on the page, and Reynor is superb as the hot, douche-y guy who you stick with because he convinces you (without saying so) that he's the best you're going to do (we've all dated that guy Dani). But the film doesn't have enough shock and feels more inclined to gross you out than actually properly scare you or make a clean-line of a story; about the most surprising thing about the film is the amount of full frontal male nudity from lead actor Reynor. It's impossible to compare a feature to a movie like Hereditary since Aster's first film was such a triumph, but as it comes so soon after it's also difficult not to do so. Hereditary was a succinct and a clear vision, Midsommar is a movie that's "supposed to be murky" but doesn't show enough clarity once we've supposedly seen what's behind the curtain, even if it houses a number of compelling scenes.
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