Midsommar and the Time/Space of Horror
Ari Aster's 2019 film is a fascinating and unsettling exploration of the temporality and spatiality of horror.
When I first saw that Ari Aster’s folk horror film Midsommar was over two hours long, I raised a skeptical eyebrow. By this point, I’ve come to have very little patience with the narrative bloat that characterizes almost every feature length film these days; I tend to be of the opinion that there’s a good reason that the hour and a half model worked for so long. When every single film seems to be over two hours (sometimes close to three!), the expanded temporal duration starts to feel less like a mark of artistic quality or ambition and more of a chore. However, the longer the film went on, the more I became convinced that, in this case, its longer running time was actually quite deliberate and that, indeed, it is key to its horrifying appeal. The film’s temporal duration, combined with its complex use of space, immerses both its characters and the viewer in an unsettling world that is, strangely enough, out of time.
If you haven’t seen the film, it’s essentially a blend of the original Wicker Man with strands of Eli Roth’s Hostel. It revolves around a young woman, Dani (Florence Pugh), whose emotionally distant boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) is a bit of a jerk, refusing to give her the sort of emotional support she clearly needs. Though it’s clear that he’s not nearly as invested in the relationship, she nevertheless agrees to go with him on a bit of a study abroad experience among a religious commune, called Hårga, in Sweden.
Almost as soon as they arrive in Sweden, things don’t seem quite as they should be. For one thing, daylight lasts almost a full 24 hours, and this plays havoc with the Americans’ sense of time and space, a phenomenon exacerbated by their consumption of hallucinogenic tea. Things get ever stranger as they find themselves welcomed into the strange religious enclave that they have come to visit, and it’s not long before the strangeness becomes frightening, especially once they witness a bizarre ritual in which two of the village’s elderly members throw themselves from a cliff in a form of ritualized suicide.
What’s especially striking about Midsommar is how much that isn’t shown. In fact, there are relatively few explicit moments of outright violence, with the suicide of two of the colony’s elder citizens being the most gruesome and explicit example (nothing will ever be able to exorcise the scene from my mind). The deaths of all but one of the main characters, however, take place off-stage, though we have the sense that there’s something not-quite-right about the goings-on. Take, for example, the demise of Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter). Having urinated on their sacred tree, Mark is led away by one of the more beautiful and waif-like villagers. We don’t know what happened to him until, several moments later, we see Josh, who is attempting to take photos of the group’s runic sacred texts, bludgeoned by someone (probably the group’s inbred and deformed oracle) wearing a mask of his face. It’s a blink-and-you’ll miss it moment, and while Mark’s fate is cleared up (even if we don’t know exactly what happened), we’re left in some ambiguity as to what will become of Josh. A similar ambiguity marks the fates of Connie and Simon, a pair of British visitors lured to the village by another of its members. The village elders have assured Connie that Simon went to the train station without her, but we didn’t see him do so, just as we don’t see what happens to Connie.
Indeed, it’s only when Christian desperately tries to escape from the village that he (and we) finally see what has come to pass. As he stumbles through Hårga--still inebriated and reeling from a fertility ritual in which he had sex with a young female resident--he sees Josh’s dismembered leg sticking up out of a garden and then, even more horrifyingly, finds Simon in the chicken coop, his body tied to the ceiling, his eyes stuffed with flowers, and his lungs pulled out of his back in a blood eagle. Since we didn’t see these deaths take place before our eyes, we are encouraged, instead, to imagine how it transpired, to allow our imagination to run wild, to plunge into the darkest and most sinister of our fantasies. And, since it’s apparent that Simon is, miraculously, still alive (his lungs inflate and deflate before our eyes), our sense of horror and terror is rendered all the more acute, as we are forced to recognize the indescribable agony that he must still be feeling. When, somewhat later, Christian is sewn into a bear carcass and burned alive in a temple, we see that Connie, showing signs of being drowned, has also been offered up as a sacrifice.
Midsommar’s coyness about depicting the death of its main characters is all the more striking when compared to its otherwise expansive use of the visual field. Time and again, we get long and overhead shots that give us a broad sense of space, intensified by the omnipresent bright sunlight. Like the characters, we’re immersed in a world that’s too bright, too glaring, simply too much. Like Al Pacino’s tormented antihero in Insomnia, we’re profoundly unsettled by the persistent daylight, not sure how to process the sheer brightness that inundates our senses. As many have noted, horror usually relies for its frights on things happening in the dark--which is, after all, where the monster or the killer lurks, just waiting for the chance to strike--but Midsommar lays it all out there for us to see. The villagers, in trying to purge the darkness of their own souls, have brought it out into the shattering light of day.
Furthermore, through its use of long shots, Midsommar provides the viewer with a surfeit of visual information, much of which foreshadow the terrifying events to come. We see, for example, numerous prints and tapestries depicting disturbing yet also strangely whimsical scenes, and they seem designed to convey the sense that the film is something of a demented fairy tale rather than a straight-up horror film. Likewise, during their tour of the village Dani and her friends see a bear in a cage, the meaning of which only becomes clear once Christian is sewn up inside of its carcass. Though we may not know exactly how things are going to pan out in these scenes, we know that something isn’t quite right and that few if any of these unsuspecting (and, frankly, sometimes downright arrogant) Americans are going to survive the ordeal.
And, of course, there is the temporal duration of the film. Aster makes full use of his two and a half hours, allowing us to experience with the characters the slowly-unfolding sense of doom as two things occur simultaneously. On the one hand, the long-simmering tensions among the four Americans slowly bubble to the surface and tear apart their fragile peace, and one of those fascinating long shots shows all four of the American characters sitting next to one another, their anger--at one another, at the village, at themselves--made manifest. We subsequently watch the dissolution of Christian’s and Dani’s relationship, since the former continues to have no interest in giving the latter the emotional support that she needs (this, despite the fact that her parents were murdered by her mentally ill sister in the early part of the film). Christian’s friendship with Josh similarly breaks down once the two begin to compete with one another for the right to study the villagers for their graduate work. On the other hand, we also start to feel the sense of dread slowly suffuse our bodies, as the cheerfulness of the villagers, the never-ending sunlight, and the mysterious goings-on start to make us doubt our collective sanity and to wonder whether we, like the characters, have stumbled into some strange world out of a Northern European folktale, a space and time where anything can happen.
This temporal dilation is also evident in the way the film makes extensive use of long takes, lingering on moments for just a few seconds too long. This happens, for example, when the two village elders leap to their deaths, with the film dwelling with almost insufferable patience on their slow march toward their demise. In some ways, this entire sequence is a microcosm for the film as a whole, an agonizing tableau of strange, ethereal beauty that ends in brutality, bloodshed, and the orgiastic joy of human sacrifice, made manifest in the strange smile that flits over Dani’s face as she watches Christian burn to death.
In the imagination of Midsommar, Hårga is both a space and a time outside of the experience of its American tourists (or, presumably, its American viewers). Rather than following the temporal rhythms of modern life, the people of this small village are instead rooted to the past and the future, their lives structured by, for example, the injunction to take their own lives when they reach the age of 72 (though whether they do so willingly is somewhat ambiguous) and by the necessity of performing this purging ritual ever 90 years. Drenched in the piercing light of day, their actions cannot be hidden in the dark or in the shadows but are instead undertaken where everyone can see. None of the Americans seem to ever be able to fully accept what this means for them, and their inability to do so ultimately seals their gruesome fates.