Midsommar

Ari Aster avait déjà mis toutes ses cartes sur la table en nous montrant son écriture particulière dans son opus précédent, Hérédité. Midsommar surfe sur la vague de celui-ci, mais en s’éloignant encore plus du style purement horrifique (à certains moments, on est presque dans le drame ethnologique procédural dans lequel sont lâchées quelques scènes violentes au petit bonheur la chance). En fait, on se rapproche – et parfois un peu trop – du Dieu d’osier, qui est sans conteste l’une de ses œuvres de référence. Quoi qu’il en soit, le film a été écrit et tourné d’une façon très intéressante. Aster sait très bien où placer la caméra et à quels endroits positionner les acteurs pour créer des prises visuellement superbes. De plus, il excelle de main de maître dans la présentation d’un milieu dans lequel tant le public que les personnages principaux doivent forcément se sentir comme des étrangers indésirables et parfume le tout d’une généreuse dose d’humour (le personnage joué par Will Poulter est vraiment hilarant, malgré le côté sérieux de l’histoire). Même si la destinée des personnages centraux est relativement prévisible (manifestement par choix), en fin de compte, c’est une œuvre impeccable sur le plan technique qui parvient à divertir tout au long de ses deux heures et demie – un temps qui semble s’écouler assez vite –, Ari Aster ayant mis au point quelques surprises qui laissent le spectateur bouche bée. (25/07/2019)

Horror subgenres are bound by traditions, and this applies to “folklore horror" even more. It can’t surprise anyone, if we are talking about a movie that is centred around following and respecting traditions, right? Maybe that's why not many filmmakers are eager to make something like this. Because dealing with the fact that the viewer will know “where the movie is going" is certainly not easy. You will not only know it, but you will expect it and maybe even require it. What's worse, you get into a position where you reluctantly expose your work to the  pedestal of cult classics with The Wicker Man at the top. Nevertheless, several good films in this vein have appeared in recent years. Aster's Midsommar is the best of them (although it is paradoxically closer to the new Suspiria than the original The Wicker Man (1973). After all, as with all the best horror movies, “scaring/disturbing" is just a means of looking at ordinary problems. So Midsommar is primarily a chilling psychological study of a dysfunctional relationship/breakup, and what goes hand in hand with that is the fact that this study is disturbing, unpleasant, magnificently shot, enriched with some gore effect and performed in a riveting way. (08/09/2019)

A long-overdue stay in the village of Harga ... and what can I say? It’s great! The best couples therapy / horror about the ultimate evil and a relationship destroyer called a thesis. I've seen a lot of ambitious US horror movies in recent years that were inadvertently funny. What at first glance seems to affect the viewer's psyche as an extract from psychotropic, or perhaps even poisonous mushrooms, in fact resembles, after watching the film, the unpleasant come-down after smoking an excessive amount of marijuana cigarettes, which contain more twigs and other unpleasant ingredients. The film combines ridicule of practices that are common in sects and a bizarrely-constructed drama with the theme of toxic relationships. It works like a anthropological study written in the manic phase. In a year from now, our entire family is going to be dead. Along with Get Out, it’s the peak of the wave of indie horror films. Bye - Ari Zoroaster aka Josef Midsommar. (21/11/2019)

No sophomore slump this time. With his second feature film, Ari Aster confirms that in recent years there hasn’t been a more significant directorial breakthrough, at least not in the field of the darker genres. Midsommar’s atmosphere is unique, beautiful in its visuals and exciting in the portrayal of the concept of trauma, which the main character is experiencing. And mainly, it’s incredibly, truly incredibly bizarre. Rather than a second Hereditary, what we have here is some sort of perverted sunny fairy-tale, “The Wizard of Oz” for the weirdos, as Aster himself said in an interview. Why then only 4* (for the moment)? After Aster’s first film, I was probably expecting a more radical twist and a sharper horror ending. Midsommar manages to surprise in several individual moments (many of which were of course in the trailer), but as whole it goes in a fairly expected direction. The ending IS mad, but, once again, in a bizarre rather than horrifying manner. I could get over it, but, the fundamental difference with Hereditary is that this time, at least during the first viewing, I wasn’t able to relate to the character of Dani enough to fully comprehend her final mood. To get the meaning of Midsommer, it is absolutely essential that the relationship between Dani and Christian resonate with the viewer. But I was too enchanted by the pagan bizarreness around to live with the characters the crisis in their relationship. So, I hope that the half hour extended version that’s in the works won’t have much more gore, sex and nastiness, but will get deeper into that central relationship. That would work perfectly for me. (25/07/2019)

Midsommar is a film that will best serve people who are seeking inspiration for a very spectacular way to break up. Aster again lags behind his own ambitions. Midsommar ostentatiously gives the impression that it wants to be an essential contribution to the horror genre. However, the long runtime, slowness and seriousness emanating from the grandiose filming of everyday scenes (camera crane FTW!) and the coldly methodical, mechanically timed editing do not guarantee great depth of thought or psychology (the comparison with Bergman, who did not pretend to be enigmatic, is laughable). When you shoot a psychological horror movie and let the actors ham it up and the characters behave like idiots who do not mind the fact that people are disappearing around them, you pull the rug out from under yourself. In the final third of the film, it is as if Aster is so attached to his effort to build tension that he completely forgets to develop the banal, straightforwardly told story and to concern himself with whether the characters’ actions are consistent. Though noteworthy from an anthropological point of view and nourishing for interpretive adventurers, the attempt to pound into our head with every shot the fact that something scary is about to happen (which is paradoxically less effective than subtler hints would be) and that we are watching a tremendously sophisticated horror film becomes increasingly annoying as the minutes drag by. I could much better imagine Midsommar as a musical comedy (it is actually not far from being just that, though not intentionally) about a group of doped-up flower children singing and dancing in a meadow, wearing animal costumes and familiarising themselves with a foreign culture and cuisine, including, among other things, meat pie with baked female pubic hair. Ari Aster is not a bad director and he knows how to create a dense atmosphere in individual scenes. He would just be better served by considering what is enough. 70% (25/07/2019)