Cult Clash

On Midsommar, fascism and climate change

(A version of this article appeared in Tribune magazine, 10/08/19)

Ari Aster, writer-director of Midsommar, knows you might’ve watched 70s British horror classic The Wicker Man. But he hasn’t cribbed from it (nor its modern, bear-punching remake) so much as anticipated your familiarity with the sub-genre of ‘the creepy cult’ or at least with the wider genre conventions. One such convention is foreshadowing, which in horror is more than a screenwriting cliché or a roundabout way to say ‘telling a story’ — but an essential device to sustain the note of dread.

By now, though, double-edged dialogue, symbolic details, doomy music have all gotten groaningly obvious. In response to our genre savvy Midsommar leans in to its foreshadowing — to the point of being knowing and tongue-in-cheek. When the mysterious Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) tells bereaved American student Dani (Florence Pugh) how glad he is she’ll be joining the midsummer festivities among his Hårga people in the remote Swedish countryside, we’re meant to think: Uh-oh!

This ‘knowing foreshadowing’ encourages you to look out for which details — the mural at the start of the film, a photo of Dani crowned with flowers — might be an omen. And by looking so closely we might catch the omen behind the omens. Twenty minutes into the film we see a college dorm-room, where, in medium shot, on a table unremarked, sits a book called ‘The Secret Nazi Language of the Uthark’. ‘Uthark’ is the kooky theory that Scandinavian runes aren’t a script but a code with hidden meanings. Granted, seeing Nazis everywhere is its own kooky sub-genre of film criticism. But this single overt Nazi reference (Pelle even sketches the table for emphasis) primes you to look out for the more covert ones, and to put the film’s horror in context: between a familiar past and potential future…

In contrast to Pelle, Dani’s boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends Mark and Josh (Will Poulter, William Jackson Harper) treat her throughout their holiday as a buzzkill. She has her reasons. In contrast to the foreshadowing later, the film begins with a mystery: why Dani one wintry night can’t get through to her sister on the phone: she’s killed herself and their parents with car exhaust. But tagging along to see the Hårga won’t be the escape from…