by Jason Adams
There is a lot of bodily violence seen on-screen in Ari Aster's Midsommar -- a certain mallet comes to mind. But nowhere at any point did I wince harder than I did during a scene simply involving two people having a conversation in a college dormitory. I often reference the moment that the little ghoul girl crawls through the television screen in Ringu as being the apex of cinematic revulsion for me -- that I very nearly crawled backwards up and over my seat the first time I saw that. Midsommar's dorm scene dropped the same sensation, just emotionally...
Watching any wisps of will within poor Dani (Florence Pugh) evaporate so easily, under the slightest hint of friction from her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) who is very clearly in the wrong having hidden his summer travel plans from her, is excruciating stuff. And it's excruciating stuff because of how willing an an accomplice Pugh shows Dani to be in her own destruction -- there's not a second of resistance; Pugh's like an ice cube tossed into a blast furnace. She disintegrates zero to sixty.
We've all been there to some degree and that's why it works, but Pugh -- and Aster's script -- whittle these worst impulses down to a microscopically fine point, so needle sharp the horror of it's already several inches deep before you can even consider any scramble backwards, away from what's too late to see happening, it's happened. Dani's undoing, her house of cards collapse, took my breath away, and as it did I looked to my left and saw that those co-conspirators, this divine actress and director pairing, had already set my lungs nice and clean-like on the table beside me before I could whisper a...