Midsommar - Fairytale meets Nightmare meets MeToo

In one sense Midsommar is a subtle & labyrinthine film, in another sense though it really isn't.

Dani (Florence Pugh) is a young woman who suffers a tragedy when her sister vanishes, committing suicide and killing their parents at the same time.  She decides to go with her unloving boyfriend and his douchebag mates on a Eurotrip to rural Sweden, where one of the guys hopes to encounter a traditional people he is studying for his masters thesis.  Their friend Pelle is Swedish and has agreed to take them to the traditional Midsommar festival, which will celebrate life or some such.  Sounds like a great time.  But of course this is an Ari Astor film, so insanity, deception and a bonkers final act are only 90 minutes of film away - you have been warned.

Initially the film's descent towards a magical nightmare in its final act appears at odds with the very real drug-induced crazy of the previous 2 hours, but the visuals place us clearly in the space of a fairy tale.  Nothing is really real here.  There are a lot of messages lurking in the fairy tale, but somewhere between castigating know-it-all Americans for imposing their world view on the planet and creating a physical manifestation of one woman's loss, the real moral is about the tyranny of self-centred men.  All the men who come with Dani to Sweden are self-obsessed man-children caring either about sex or careers, pursuing self-immolation in the name of a higher power or simply being unable to notice any worldview or culture out side their own.  They are multiple manifestations of the most negative traits present in a certain type of young, privileged man.  With Midsommar, Ari Astor is calling them out; he has made the first fairytale / horror of the MeToo movement.

So far so fine.  Midsommar may be a film that has its moral compass switched on, but does it succeed beyond that?  It's certainly too long, with one or too many tripping out sequences that could have been cut without consequence.  I find it hard to get beyond thinking that it's trying too hard to be too mystical.  The film opens with a mural shot that I presumed probably tells the story to come (it does - I went back and checked), but of course we don't see it long enough to really internalise.  Early shots of Dani and company often show paintings of animals or bleak natural landscapes hung conveniently above their heads - foreshadowing their eventual fate.  Though these elements serve to underscore that this is a fairy tale (i.e. Ari Astor doesn't really think we should kill off annoying privileged young American men!), it's a touch heavy-handed.  It's these elements that make the film feel a lot more complex than it really is.  For all that messaging and psychedellic shifts of tone and shock moments, it actually has quite a straight message.  Guys - it isn't all about you.