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| And now I'm mirroring you. AAAAAAAAAA |
Jesus Christ. I was supposed to talk about a kaiju movie today! I led into it and everything, and then I got delayed, so I needed to slap something in this slot. Oh hey, this was on the docket! Suggested by friend of the blog Rain even! What's the worst that could happen? A glance at the lengthy string of content warnings I felt needed inclusion should help there. You have to understand. The beginning of this movie legitimately, no hyperbole, fucked me up. The first half is a punctuated and oft-prolonged anxiety nightmare which I'm pretty sure legitimately triggered me. I am honest to God tearing up writing this. This is not a joke, this is not a bit, this movie genuinely shook me to my core and scared me more than a glove-handed dream killer ever could. I was honestly somewhat relieved when it went in a folk horror direction of a strange communal religion with ritualistic sacrifice. That's not to say there's no connective tissue between those horrors, because there is. Let me tell you about it.
It's gaslighting. That's the alchemical macrocosm and microcosm at play in this movie. We have our protagonist, Dani, an anxious wreck of a woman with a shitty boyfriend. The first ten minutes of this shit are horrific, not the least of which is due to the murder/suicide of Dani's entire family by her sister. That's pretty fucking raw and horrific and upset me for a multitude of reasons, but I want to talk about what happens before. Dani's boyfriend Christian talks her down from being worried about her sister's suicidal "dramatics", and from the moment go I was eyebrow-raising at his dismissal. The bit that completely fucked me up, the personal horror cherry on top, is when Dani is talking to another friend and having her own anxiety meltdown over how she's worried she's burdening Christian and he doesn't like her. Cut to Christian with his boys and they're talking behind her fucking back about how she's a anxious sad sack who doesn't put out and how he should break up with her so he can get laid. I want to scream. I want to scream at the top of my fucking lungs. Let me... let me explain to you why this hit me the way it did.
That's a legitimate anxious fear I suffered and still suffer with. The idea that people are nice to you to your face but behind your back say terrible shit about how they don't like you, how you're a fuckup, how they really just can't stand you. At least two pieces of media have traumatized me with this badly-handled source of existential anxious conflict: an obscure children's Christmas cartoon from the 80's called Bluetoes, and the Star Trek TNG episode "Hollow Pursuits". Midsommar is presenting it more as gaslighting from Christian, but the palpable sense of dread this movie is marinating in followed immediately by the horrific trauma Dani is subjected to just absolutely fucking destroyed me. Everyone is shit talking you behind your back because they hate you and your family is fucking dead. Jesus. At least the part of the movie that's about the creepy commune with its strange rituals planning to murder everyone is somehow less harrowing than this. It's still about gaslighting, though.
That's the macrocosm of the movie compared to Christian's microcosm gaslighting and scummy behavior. This commune deep in the heart of Sweden is gaslighting Dani at every opportunity, but in the reverse. Whereas Christian is negging her and making her always seem like an overreacting hysterical Wrong Person, the Swedish folk are nice to her. They understand her, they give her the space she needs, they help her to finally cope with the grief she's feeling and accept her for who she is without shittalking her behind her back. They also are murderers who lured outsiders to this place specifically for their ritualistic goals of murder and continuing their bloodline. Christian, shitheel that he is, is literally drugged out of his gourd and coerced into a sex ritual against his well. That's sexual assault no matter what strange arcane bullshit is involved. Everyone else is murdered for apparant transgressions, but let's be real; they were brought here to be murdered. They could have been squeaky clean and these people would still find an excuse to kill them for the ritual... because they're gaslighters. So friendly on the face of it, but behind closed doors it's presumably all OKAY SO WHEN DO WE KILL THIS ONE? Can it be truly called a sacrifice if you yourself aren't giving up something precious and instead are coercing a random stranger you don't give two shits about here so they can die for the ritual instead of someone you care for? Oh, but this group has that all figured out, it's an equal opportunity thing where for every outsider they kill, they give up one of their own. Yes, that sure makes it fair. They even lie to them too, pretending to give them drugs to numb the pain before the end. And yet the final shot of this movie implies a horrific 1984-style ending, where Dani wins the war against her anxiety and loves the cult.
This movie's fucking terrifying. Can I watch a giant turtle monster now, please?
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