Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Midsommar
2019 · Ari Aster · Midsommar on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the painted walls and hangings in every building. (setting)
Svensson covered the Hårga's yellow halls in runes, weavings and a mural cycle. The paintings show, calmly and in folk-art reds and ochres, things the film will later stage with actual bodies.
Payoff: The décor is a text and it has already been written. Nobody inside the film can read their own walls. In the reading: the readable image. The reading calls these lectosigns, readable images: pictures that ask to be deciphered instead of telling anyone what to do.
Notice there is no darkness anywhere in the film. (light)
The midnight sun never sets. Pogorzelski keeps the whites high and the meadow greens flat, so nothing is concealed and there is no off-screen dark for a threat to wait in.
Payoff: Horror usually hides. Here everything is visible and you still cannot do anything about it, which is what makes the brightness oppressive.
Watch the camera rotate on the drive to the commune. (camera)
The image turns until the landscape hangs upside down over the windshield. Nothing in the plot calls for it. Elsewhere Pogorzelski locks into centered symmetry and slow creeping push-ins.
Payoff: The move announces a change of rules. From here you are reading a world rather than following an action. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The reading calls the village a closed set: a frame with no outside, where everything that matters is already inside the picture.
Watch Pugh gasp and apologize while she is crying. (performance)
Pugh plays grief in unflattering registers: breath caught, sobs swallowed, the social work of saying sorry for having feelings at all. Reynor plays Christian as ordinary neglect, which is the point.
Payoff: The relationship is the real machine here. Watch what Dani has to do to make her pain acceptable to the man beside her.
Listen for wind, insects and singing under every scene. (sound)
Krlic writes swelling strings and folk drones that are genuinely beautiful rather than dissonant. Under them runs a constant field of outdoor sound. There are no night noises because there is no night.
Payoff: The score makes the commune attractive. You are being invited to find it lovely at the same time it turns monstrous.
Once you have seen it
Time the long scenes that run past your comfort. (cutting)
Johnston lets the rituals play at their real duration. The cliff sequence holds long after you want out. Nothing accelerates, so the ceremonies register as endurance rather than shock.
Payoff: Dani can only watch, and the cutting puts you in her position. Time is what this film makes you spend.
Watch the maypole dance: the ring, the spinning, the language. (staging)
Dani is pulled into a circle of white-clad women and stops producing her own movement. She ends up speaking Swedish she does not know. The world is doing the moving, not her.
Payoff: She wins by being carried. The film keeps replacing her decisions with a current that sweeps her along. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the person goes still at the center while the world turns around and through her.
Listen to the Hårga women wailing in time with Dani. (sound)
They kneel around her and cramp when she cramps, breath for breath. The sound design and the performances fuse into one body making one noise.
Payoff: Christian could not hold one woman's grief. The commune holds it with a hundred throats, and that is the film's argument.
Look at what Dani is wearing by the last day. (staging)
The visitors arrive in ordinary clothes against the Hårga's uniform white embroidery. Dani gets dressed last, then buried in a wearable bower of flowers so heavy she can barely move.
Payoff: The costume completes the design program. Belonging here is something you get sewn into and cannot walk out of.
Carry this in: Watch the walls. The paintings tell you where this is going long before anyone in the film notices.