Thursday, January 16, 2020

The Review: Midsommar



Midsommar 9/10

This will be full of spoilers. Like complete full on ass spoilers. I watched Midsommar with Koko yesterday because I still have no blu-ray player. This is one of the movies that would have been amazing in a theater in full Black Stereo. This movie is a mixture of all the things I don't want to do and they just get piled on top of one another. I cursed a lot while watching this and telling people to not do things that seem totally normal to everyone else. It starts with this college student named Dani trying to contact her sister after getting some dark ass emails from her. She can't get in touch with her parents either. She calls her boyfriend Christian (who you will learn to hate after thinking he was cool) who says that her sister, who is bipolar, does this all the time for attention. He is not happy with Dani but doesn't have the balls to break up with her and his friends think she is too much and that they need to split. Next thing you know Dani calls him wailing on the phone.


Turns out her sister was 'bout that life and hooked a hose up to two cars and ran one nozzle into her parents room killing them and one right into her mouth killing herself. Now Christian still wants to split with her but would be the ultimate dick to do it right now. Before this you see that she already takes anti anxiety pills. They go to a party and she finds out that Christian was planning on going to Sweden and he never told her. She explains why that is a shitty thing to do and he tries to gaslight her ass. He invites her but says that she said she will go but won't actually go. So of course she wants to go. So far we have reached the first part of me being nervous. They are in another country. After driving for hours they find Pelle's, the Swedish dude, people. He was raised in a small village. Second part of me being nervous. He says it is a community and they all wear white. Part three of the nervousness! Oh, now they take mushrooms. Fuck this. Oh, and there is a Black dude there and someone I knew that had seen this did not tell me anything about this movie but said that there was a good reason for him to be there which there was. I have to point that out because as a Black person who grew up watching horror I know that for the most part we do not go to strange ass places where no one else looks like else.


Dani starts tripping on the drugs and runs away to a bathroom and sees some face in the mirror and runs out and ends up sleeping for six hours. There is no night here. When it is dark its like 5pm dark. They meet with the rest of the commune and on the outside it is pretty damn perfect looking. Everyone is happy and singing. There is live background music playing. Shit seems fine. Pelle explains that this is a nine day festival. They end up going to a festival where they all gather at the bottom of a cliff and the next thing you know an old woman takes the Nestea Plunge off that bastard! In case you are wondering, yes, they show her hit the ground. They show every aspect of what it looks like when someone dies from a fall from a great height. But wait. There's more! The old guy takes the leap and does not die but his leg looks like the 405 at 4:30 in the afternoon. Then its hammer time. Three people take turns bashing his face in with a hammer. The village wails with him until he is dead. Dani and Christian and the rest are freaked out but not enough to leave yet. As soon as I saw that old lady up there I would have vanished into thin air.


One of the elders explains that the people do this when they are older and it is recycling. The fuck?! Pelle explains some of the other weird aspects of the group. They all sleep in one room until they are 18. Then another until they are 36. Then when they are 72 they electric slide off a cliff. There are other people that were invited by group members. This couple Simon and Connie from London want to get the fuck away. Later Connie is packing and told that Simon is already at the station and they will come back for her. You can guess how their story ends. If you can't I'll tell you later. Christian being an asshole decides to do his thesis on this group after Josh who has been studying this shit for years has already told him that he was. I loved the scene when he points out that Christian ain't shit. At this point this young girl has taken a liking to Christian and everyone sees it. Oh, hi Mark. Forgot to mention him.


Mark is the dude that you don't want to bring with you anywhere. He vapes everywhere he is. He wants to fuck everything in the room. So at one point he ends up peeing on this tree and this guy loses his shit on him. Turns out the tree is sacred to their entire lineage. The guy mad dogs Mark the rest of the movie until Mark is called away to talk to someone and you never see his ass. Well, you see him but not alive. Josh starts interviewing people for his thesis and wants to take photos of their book but it is forbidden. Of course he sneaks out to take pictures and ends up being snuck on by Mark. But it ain't Mark. Someone is wearing Mark's face! Stop. Hammer time! Josh gets his head bashed in. So now two dudes are dead from the group. By the way, I am having fun writing this review for this crazy ass movie. If I had seen this sooner it would have made my Best Movies Of The Year list.


Dani is suspicious that Connie and Simon are gone. Josh and Mark (dead) are missing and allegedly so is one of their sacred books. Christian distances himself from his friends and is in full asshole mode now. During a ceremony Dani is brought in to dance around a maypole. The last person standing wins. She gets some more drugs and dances around until she is last. Meanwhile Christian drinks some crazy shit and is called to speak to one of the elders. He explains he does not know where the book is but she is like “This ain't about that book. This about that dick of yours.” She brings him into this room where the young girl is butt booty ass naked surrounded by a bunch of naked old ladies singing. He inhales some other drug that gets him rock hard and has sex with her. And by sex I mean the weirdest sex scene I have seen...in years. I sold porn for seven years. I have seen some weird shit. One old lady is even pushing his ass to go deeper. The cringing was real! So he finishes up and runs out the place but naked. He finds Simon, or what is left of him, hanging in a chicken coop with his lungs outside his body and still sort of alive. And Connie was drowned but that was a deleted scene. Christian turns around and gets dust blown in his face and collapses.


Dani who won the queen contest is paraded around and ends up spotting Christian having sex in this weird ass room and starts wailing. Not crying. Wailing. The other women surround her and begin wailing just like her. It was creepy. But she digs it. Think. Since her family died no one has really talked to her about it or comfort her. You never see her friends. The only person that talked to her about it or remembered her birthday was Pelle the guy who invited them. So now there is this big ceremony where nine sacrifices have to be made. Josh, Connie, Simon, and Mark are there. Four members of the village. And it is up to Dani to pick the ninth one. Of course she picks Christian! He is sewn into the corpse of a bear and burned alive in a room with everyone else. In case you are wondering why he didn't fight it that drug they gave him keeps him from talking or being able to move. Dani is sad looking at first until she slowly starts to smile watching the fire burn and then...credits.


This movie was fucking insane but I couldn't suggest it to everyone. This is not one of those movies where you can be checking your phone or stepping out of the room. Every scene has a detail. I didn't even mentioned the pube pie! Yeah, I left that out. You deal with it. They explain the ultra mega imbred kid. The effects in this are subtle but amazing. We had to rewind a scene at a table because the flowers were subtly alive as well as the food they were eating. There are faces hidden in objects. You see flashes of her dead family pop up in the crowd. This was done by the same director as Hereditary and I couldn't even make it halfway through that movie because I thought it was wack. This one though was great and spooky and creepy and gross at times and insane. I just watched the trailer and there are definitely some scenes that are not in the movie but maybe in the extended version.This is now on Amazon.

Florence Pugh as Dani Ardor
Jack Reynor as Christian Hughes
William Jackson Harper as Josh
Vilhelm Blomgren as Pelle
Will Poulter as Mark
Ellora Torchia as Connie
Archie Madekwe as Simon

Click here for previous The Review.

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