電影《仲夏魘》影評：[Film Review] Midsommar (2019) 6.9/10

Merely within an one-year span, US breakout horror practitioner Ari Aster has already knocked off his sophomore feature after the excellently gothic familial gore HEREDITARY (2018), MIDSOMMAR spirts a posse of American college students away to a Swedish commune called H?rga in H?lsingland, under the name of partaking the titular celebration which occurs once every ninety years. Among them, Dani (Pugh) is ailed by a recent horrendous bereavement (presented by its chilling prologue), which also aggravates her already strained relationship with post-graduate boyfriend Christian (a hung Reynor baring it all becomes the hype).

The outsiders’ inchoate curiosity and amazement (typically and predominantly conduced by psychedelic enhancement from endemic drugs or libations) of the ancestral festivity soon dissolves into shuddering horror when a radical senicide ritual is executed with grisly cruelty (bludgeoning a human skull to pieces is not a pretty scene and Aster is quite cagey about the necessity of aggrandizing such graphic mutilation, just blame it on the sacrosanct shibboleth!), and it is in evidence that the commune is a pagan cult, but apart from a couple from UK, who actually fashions their volition of departing in action despite that their ill-fated denouement is much par for the course, the core USA quartet, Dany, Christian, Josh (Harper) and Mark (Poulter) has only velleity to manifest and all opts for staying eventually, for reasons vary.

If they stick together, they might have a slim chance to evade the impending baptism of fire, but the hoary internecine severance renders them virtually no grounds for escaping, bar Dani, whose acute susceptibility and inexplicably case-hardened resolute seems to find a kindred spirit in the Nordic mysticism, and her final compliance with the cult might well derive from a deep-rooted reprisal of her inimical codependency with Christian and self-imposed survivor’s guilt, but frustratingly, Dani’s substantive rite of passage is deficient in lucidity or eloquence, although Ms. Pugh gallantly leaves a mesmeric impression (particularly in the first half) with defiance, and the lay of the land slavishly takes its cue from Robin Hardy’s THE WICKER MAN (1973), not least with its immolating finale. Moreover, among the vast cult members, distinction is at a premium, no devilishly charismatic villain like Christopher Lee in Hardy’s movie, the elements of these Scandinavian pagans are nondescriptly unified and de-characterized, even the duplicitous Pelle (Blomgren), is deduced to a mere cypher in favor of underling the clan as a homogenous mass consisted of rabid blind faith (malformed oracles borne out of deliberate incest) and bone-chilling cruelty.

While cheap jump-scare machination is thankfully eschewed, sadly, it also betrays Aster’s lack of means to invoke the anticipated sense of horror (lurid violence aside), MIDSOMMAR’s scary quotient is evidently dialed down from the far creepier HEREDITARY, instead, what it conjures up is an insidious, otherworldly folklore transfused with daymares in broad daylight, outfit with high-end production value (the bucolic, architectonic main set is a well-constructed crucible of ineffable terror) and special effects (Dani’s breathing florid costume is definitely a heads-turner), and vibrated with a sinisterly disquieting, reductive auditory through-line courtesy of experimental UK musician Bobby Krilic aka. The Haxan Cloak, it is safe to say, MIDSOMMAR has many strings to its exotica-exploiting, commune-disparaging bow.

referential entries: Astor’s HEREDITARY (2018, 7.6/10); Robin Hardy’s THE WICKER MAN (1973, 7.4/10).