nadine 🔪’s review published on Letterboxd:
“Do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?”
is this what grief counseling is like in sweden? anyone wanna go with me? i hear sweden is beautiful this time of year
at one point during... this thing, i got hit with such a nauseating wave of panic i almost started hyperventilating. i had slid very far down my seat with my jacket shoved up to my ears and was grinning to myself cause Midsommar is one very sick-humored mofucker. and suddenly my heart was racing so fast i thought i was going to die, smile frozen on my face, hand mid-scratch on my cheek and this perversity of a purge, a devilish catharsis washed over me.
while marinating in Dani’s grief Ari Aster slowly set up a bright veneer of white dresses, flowers and celebrations, lulled me with the beauty of nature and its drugs. made me feel held. like i was home. i guess you’ve read that before but it’s such an antithesis to last year’s Hereditary in many ways but predominantly through the horrors painted in daylight and overexposure by the incredible Pawel Pogorzelski instead of gothic darkness. a master of his craft.
with Hereditary you also had the claustrophobia and domestic abjection making it a confining experience as opposed to the liberation of open spaces and overwhelming family commune in Midsommar. i love and hate this film so much. it’s quiet and creeping, yet loud and obnoxious when Bobby Krlic’s tunes mix with eyesearing images. i don’t think i’d ever want to see this while high because the terror of peripherally moving nature is already scarring enough as is.
euphoria and trauma become one and that’s when i lost all sense of reality and got pulled inside out, laid bare with my bloody hands begging against the futhark runes for release. where did my head go? up into the eye of the sky that you never even see, just the glorious shine on the pastoral dimension that so repulses. wrong.
