Midsommar, 2019

November 14, 2022 | PAOLA MATIAS

The film Midsommar (inspired by the real Midsummer Festival) follows a group of Americans – Dani (the protagonist), Christian, Mark, Pelle and Josh – and their trip to Sweden. The film opens with Dani trying to communicate with her emotionally detached boyfriend, Christian, after her suicidal sister was not returning any of her messages or calls. A few minutes later it is discovered that Dani’s sister ended up taking her life through car exhaust and their parents die from the fumes of the car. Fast forward to after the incident, Dani is still with her boyfriend. Dani becomes traumatized after her family’s death, while Christian shows sympathy and only stays with her because he feels she has gone through enough pain. Christian and his friends (Mark, Pelle, and Josh) are planning a trip to Sweden for a midsommar celebration in Harga, the village in which Pelle grew up on. While hanging out with Christian's friends, Dani Talks to Pelle, in which he explains to her what the festival is about and the tradition of choosing a May Queen at the end. Pelle tries to console Dani, telling her about his parents that also passed away, but the mention of it ends up triggering Dani. Christian is hesitant to bring Dani on the trip, but eventually invites her.

After the group arrives on Midsommar, they drive to the village and meet Pelle’s brother, Ingemar and an English couple, Simon, and Connie. The group takes some magic mushrooms, while Dani drinks a special tea that Ingemar offered her. Dani decides to go for a walk and starts to experience a bad trip. She gets paranoid and decides to run into the woods where she passed out and dreamt about her family. She wakes up next to Christian a few hours later and they decide to join their friends, going back to the village to meet the Harga community. Christian gets noticed by Maja, a girl who shows interest in him by kicking him playfully while he was sitting down on the grass. Later, Pelle gives Dani a gift for her birthday, while Dani tells him that Christian forgot her birthday. Pelle reminds Christian, who the gives Dani a piece of cake as an apology. The group joins the community for a fest the next day. Two of the oldest villagers are the guest of honor and after the feast the community follows them up a hill where they cut their hands. The group watches in horror as the two elderly people jump off the cliff, the woman dying on the landing and the man only shattering his leg and then some villagers taking his life by smashing his head with a sledgehammer. Simon and Connie are horrified and express their horror. A villager explains to the group that this was a natural part of the ritual, in which the two elders reach the end of their life cycle and living longer would have been bad. Pelle tries to comfort Dani, but she denies since Christian is her boyfriend and his friend.

Simon and Connie wanted to leave after what they witnessed, but Connie is told by a villager, that Simon left with another villager to the train they are supposed to take back, without her. Meanwhile, Josh wants to do a thesis on Harga, and Christian tells him that he also wants to write about it. Josh gets mad and later learns that the villagers’ ritual practices are drawings made by a deformed boy. The boy being the product of incest but is seen as a seer. Josh wants to take picture of the drawing but he was told that it was forbidden. The elderly couple are burned, and their ashes were spread on an ancestral tree, in which Mark pees on and gets scolded by a villager, who ends up crying over the disrespect. Meanwhile Josh and Christian get permission to write about the village but they have to omit names and the location. While doing research Christians discovered that incest in the village was not frown upon, but also that outsiders are brought to the village to procreate with the villagers. At a fest Mark notices a villager giving him hard ayes and Dani hears that Connie was taken to the station. Then Mark is taken away by a female villager and the group doesn’t hear back from him.

In the night Josh decides to sneak into the room with the drawings to take pictures. He is interrupted by who he thinks is Mark and then gets bludgeoned on the head. The figure comes into view, showing a villager wearing Mark’s face. The next morning the rest of the group is told the book with the drawings disappeared, making the disappearance of both Mark and Josh suspicious. After Dani joins a competition in which the women dance around a pole. Dani was the last one standing and crowned the May Queen. At the same moment, Christian was handed a drink that induced a trip, after he is ‘seduced’ and taken to Maja, where later he ends up having sex with her. While they were having sex, they were surrounded by naked elder females that mimicked Maja’s moaning. Dani ends up seeing Christian and Maja together and breaks down, the other females from the festival join in and mimic her screams. Once Christian was done, he ran mortified trying to find Dani, but discovered Josh’s and Simon’s dead bodies. Christian later is found and knocked out by one of the villagers. Once the end of the ritual came nearer, Dani was forced to choose between Christian and Ingemar for a sacrifice and she ends up choosing Christian. The film ends with Dani hearing the screams the villagers mimic after they placed all their sacrifices in the golden teepee, that it is later set on fire, and a crazy smile on her face.

Relativism is the idea that morality is relative., while ethical objectivism is the thought that some ethical principles are universally valid. Even though it is a heavy claim to make, objectivism is more logically less demanding than relativism. Relativism is the idea that our own moral agreements are always relative to something else. There is also Cultural Relativism, which means that moral truth depends on the culture. We can see this in Midsommar, a group of Americans seeing another culture and finding it weird and bad because it is not like theirs. Some people may even think of the villagers as a cult, but others could see it as a culture. The reason being, that they had a ritual and were sacrificing people but justifying it as part of their culture. So, what counts as a passable culture? If relativism is true, moral codes will not be generally valid. If not, then what principles can be found that can apply to every culture? A proposed principle could be "All cultures must help their young survive. Actions that are conducive to the survival of the next generation are justified" (James Rachel.) In Midsommar, we can see this with the death of the two elders and the procreation with outsiders and the villagers see this as beneficial in their own way. It can be accepted that cultures have different moral codes without accepting cultural relativism.