2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 9th

Midsommar (2019) [Kanopy]

Americans probably just shouldn't go abroad anymore.  Between the hostels and the creeptacular Swedish communes, it's just not a safe world anymore.  Especially if you're going to be a bunch of dicks when you get there.

Midsommar is good.  It's not as good as The Wicker Man (1973), which is the movie everyone was comparing this to when it came out.  Understandable comparisons, given that both films are about remote villages receiving visitors during their weird pagan fertility festivals.  But where The Wicker Man is a movie where things really aren't what they seem, Midsommar is a movie where everything is just about pretty much what you'd expect; and this isn't merely a function of Midsommar having the misfortune of arriving after nearly five decades of folk horror (more if you count the literary antecedents that started hitting paperback spinner racks in the 1960s or so), it's entirely a function of, well, things being pretty much what they seem, and Midsommar having nothing quite comparable to The Wicker Man's final act twists in which even the audience members who were pretty suss to what's happening in Summerisle discover that there were two or three things they probably won't have figured out.  Not to mention that Midsommar doesn't quite have anything comparable to The Wicker Man's snarky commentary on organized religion and superstitious faith.  Nor does Midsommar ever quite manage to make its stakes as significant as the stakes feel throughout most of The Wicker Man, which is in some part a problem with Midsommar's characters never coming across as compelling as they need to be.

This last bit, I should emphasize, isn't the fault of the cast, who is across-the-board excellent. Florence Pugh is especially good and I'll watch William Jackson Harper in just about anything.  It's entirely a matter of the script needing to have these kids up in this isolated Swedish village even when it's not necessarily all that plausible for them to be up there, and to frequently be doing dickish and stupid things even when that seems to be required by the plot more than it's a plausible projection of their backgrounds.

It's a visually arresting film, though, gorgeously shot and well edited.  I mostly enjoyed it, though parts of it are intentionally hard to watch (content warnings for suicide and what basically amounts to a rape).  It's quite good, a solid B or B+, and one of the better movies I've watched this month.