Midsommar is a waking nightmare

Vilhelm Blomgren and Florence Pugh in Midsommar. Image courtesy A24.

Midsommar milks a lot of terror out of predictability. It's made very clear very early something bad is going to happen, and a passing familiarity with a certain horror genre prepares viewers for how poorly everything ends. Yet the film not only overcomes the obvious result, it uses the inevitability to its advantage to make things even more horrifying than before. Midsommar is a distorted countdown toward doom, with the horror stemming from the time-confused journey to the chaotically drug-soaked finale. 

 

Midsommar stars the ferocious Florence Pugh as Dani, a grad student constantly on the verge of both tears and breaking up with her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor). They stay together though heading into a midsummer festival in Sweden organized by Christian's friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) and his commune. Flanked by Christian's bros Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter), Dani and Christian dive into the life of the peaceful, drug-fueled world of a small town where the sun never fully sets. The festival is not quite as it seems as a sinister undertones percolate up and the trip takes a dramatic turn for the worst.

Midsommar is a master class in film directing. Every shot has a purpose, every frame reveals a lot without telling too much. This film is about as close to technically perfect as a horror film can get, crafting an intense and discomfiting atmosphere that absolutely swallows people into its strangely sunny heart. Even the coldness that results from such technically precise filmmaking adds an untrustworthy layer of removal, an illusion of distance befitting a film about the distance between people and the ease of which it spreads. Kindness in this movie is a falsity, and writer/director Ari Aster's most vicious act is to allow the audience to even slightly pretend everything is safe.

Except for the special effects. Aster loves some blood and guts, showing as much violence as he can and leaving precious little to the imagination; if there's a body to throw down a mountain, he's going to show you exactly how hard it lands. This is a good idea for this film, with the initial shock of a sudden act of violence ultimately melting into the film's otherwise fever dream sense of reality. But the props he uses look terrible, clearly false and resulting in moments that are more funny than jarring. Midsommar depends so much on its atmosphere to carry the proceedings having one element look bad comes perilously close to revealing the facade behind it all. It's more effective on principle for this film to show the gore, but the lack of quality in the gore itself nearly cancels out the benefits.

The bodies are an unfortunate reminder of poor cinema craftsmanship, but the rest of Midsommar is a waking nightmare. It's a bloody trip, an experience to survive and wade through as the wait for the bad things to happen intensifies. And all of this happens in under the sun, with barely any darkness to be found. Fear is conveyed best in the dark, where the imagination replaces the senses and bad dreams overwhelm good nights of sleep. Aster shoots almost everything in the light, which is traditionally safe and warm and a refuge from the evils that lurk in the shadows. How then does one make the light even more terrifying than the dark? The effect is due in part to the copious drug use from the characters that eventually seeps into the filmmaking – it's difficult to have a firm grasp of exactly what's going on over the last 30 minutes.

 

Aster's most interesting trick is playing with the concept of safety in daylight. The film is so bright, so filled with white and purity it should come across as impossible for anything bad to take place. But removing darkness creates a distrust of the light – no community can be this friendly, no place can be this innocent. The thought is disorienting by intention, designed to confuse and to horrify as the validity of those doubts gains more and more truth. The evil in Midsommar hides in plain sight, only revealing itself far too late to do anything about it.

Review: Four and a half out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

 

Rating: R

Run time: 140 minutes

Genre: Horror

tl;dr

What Worked: Atmosphere, Florence Pugh, Directing

What Fell Short: Special Effects

What To Watch As Well: The Wicker Man

Kin falls short of matching its ambitions

Myles Truitt in Kin. Image courtesy Lionsgate.

Kin has a scattered mind. The movie has a lot of ideas skittering around, topics it addresses fleetingly or inconsistently. There are plots and themes aplenty, but no vision for how to tell the story, nor a simple direction for the plot to go. That's the problem with a scattered mind; it goes all over the place without completing a single thought.

Kin has a lot it could be about. It's about a 14-year-old outcast named Eli (Myles Truitt) who stumbles upon alien technology. It's about his older brother and ex-con Jimmy (Jack Reynor) doing his best to evade the consequences of his action. It's about a single father (Dennis Quaid) doing the best he can to raise his sons. It's about the roaming exotic dancer Milly (Zoë Kravitz) learning to trust again. It's about psychotic gangster Taylor (James Franco) hellbent on revenge for his own fallen kin. It's about the destruction of a city. It's about bonding with family on the road. It's about the lies we tell to keep going in life. It's about bonding on the road. It's about doing the right thing when the opportunity arises to do it. It's about protecting one's family from their own worst habits. It's about getting lost in youth and growing up. It’s about how time on the road can bring people closer together. But Kin feels incomplete despite touching on so many themes. Because the movie can't commit to any of these stories and themes to tell a clean, coherent story or have a consistent narrative thread. It's shotgun art, the paint shot against the wall to create something resembling art, but instead coming out as splattered gunk in which brilliance is seen with the head tilted at the right angle and the eyes squinted just enough.

The fault lies with filmmakers Jonathan and Josh Baker, who adapted their short film Bag Man into this feature length flick. From watching the short, it's clear the Bakers couldn't come up with a clean method to translate a simple, direct 12-minute film into the 102 minute mess they came up with. The problem goes beyond the push to incorporate as many ideas as possible into the film to include the simple execution of their stories. Kin has one of the most egregious idiot plots in recent film history, in which a 14-year-old boy is duped into believing a whopper of a lie without questioning the motivation. Despite the circumstances that incite the lie, Eli's clear understanding of the people around him, and the illogical nature of sudden road trips, Eli never digs into Jimmy why they’re going on their trip. The reveal for Eli comes through in a clunky, awkward fashion that reinforces just how gullible Eli has been for almost two-thirds of the movie. There's no good reason for why the Bakers opted to make their central character so remarkably dim, but it ends up making him an uninteresting character, and it gives Truitt almost nothing to work with to build his character.

Then again, few characters in this film are allowed moments of depth or interest. Milly exists because the Bakers needed a woman in the narrative; she's not allowed to do anything noteworthy. Jimmy is selfish and stupid, hiding information from his brother for reasons that never make a lot of sense. Franco's character is designed to be weird and uncomfortable, a role he has succeeded at in the past. Yet Franco doesn't go far enough with the material he has, restraining himself from dipping into the madness the character justly deserves, and giving the movie the cartoonish villain it drastically needs to stave off the encroaching sense of boredom that hits after the first act.

By default some of this has to work. The first few moments of Eli navigating through a broken Detroit alone is graceful, and there are elements of the road trip between Eli and Jimmy that have a quiet charm to them. Kin does a decent enough job using montages to show the relationship between the strained siblings growing, eliding over unnecessary dialog. At least, it does with this story, because there is still plenty of fat dialog spreading all over the place, especially in the big, useless twist at the end telegraphed poorly by the Bakers. Kin offered the Bakers a chance to build a nice little universe, but they just don’t know how to use their space efficiently.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 102 minutes

Genre: Sci-Fi

tl;dr

What Worked: The small moments on the road, the first shots of Eli

What Fell Short: The story, acting, premise, and James Franco

What To Watch As Well: Attack the Block, Chronicle, Spring Breakers