Midsommar is not really a movie that needs my analysis, since it wears its themes on its sleeve so explicitly. What's it about? Oh modernist anomie encountering and being devoured by pre-modern folk tribalism, right.
Contra the advertising of this movie, most of the emotional heart of the movie is the four nihilistic college and grad students looking to find escapism at their friend's "quaint" family summer retreat. The main character and final girl is devastatingly depressed after her bipolar sister commits murder/suicide with their parents at the start of the film. Her boyfriend and his friendgroup are cliche millennial academic types who want to get him out of a clingy relationship while of course doing the right, polite thing for her in the Seinfeld sense of morality without ethics. They are led by their cultist-wolf-in-millennial-sheeps' clothing "friend" to a tight knit community with drugs, eerie and beautiful summer weather, and the promise of fun and research opportunities. Said commune turns out to want to sacrifice them to their god in the aim of cleansing their own sin.
Much of the movie is about the visitors being easily misled by the cultists. It is a movie very much in the vein of mocking the Zizek decaffeinated Other:
"Today's tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight.)"
Replace wife-beating here with "ritual suicide at reaching 72 years of age." The visitors are so focused on the dances, and promise of sex, that they don't take seriously the promise of sacrifice.
But more than that, the cultists use the millennials' own weakness - their lack of community and mutual distrust of each other - to fool them. The folk Harga are all about relying on each other and bonding, whereas the visitors compete for academic prizes or are in relationships that are clearly unhealthy and deteriorating. So whenever the Harga get one visitor alone and victimize them, they are able to lie to the rest of the visitors and blame the out of towner... and their fellow millennials easily buy the bait. Because they can all too easily believe the worst things about themselves.
This unquestioning bond is the Harga's chief strength, and their temptation to our heroine. She has just gone through an unutterable loss, and while her boyfriend knows all the "right" gestures to do in how he is supposed to support her, he can't actually help her move on from the loss. What does she want then?
One of the most notable non-formal things about the Harga community is the disturbing way they share intense emotions. Especially during scenes of pain, when one person is undergoing agony, every member of the town will begin screaming and moaning and gyrating and clawing at themselves, as if they too are experiencing this suffering. (We also see it in the ritual sex scene, so presumably it's not just for pain.) Even when the sufferer is a victim and their pain has been inflicted by the community, they will still practice this radical empathy for it.
When the heroine herself is in extreme pain, having seen her boyfriend participating in ritual sex (set up by the commune), her new sisters fall down screaming with her just as seriously as if they too were cheated on. And this shows what she needed: no one could bring her parents back, and the polite duties of a boyfriend weren't enough, but some family that would scream and suffer alongside her was the only thing that could give her peace. And it's why she joins the commune and betrays her friends, and even wails in agony at the end with someone burning in a sacrificial fire she is responsible for.
***
All of that is the plaintext of the film. There's no subtext to read really. The set design and creepy scenes are very pretty, but nothing about the movie is mysterious or going to surprise anyone, when the themes are laid out so clearly and so early on. The whole runtime gets rather repetitive really, with the same banging of these two cultures together and always to the same effect.
Except for one scene. Plotwise this scene would be the climax, but it's so completely undercut and underwhelming that it's much harder to interpret, and possibly the only twist on the whole endeavor.
This is the scene where our final girl has been crowned May Queen and gets to choose the final sacrifice. She is presented with one townsperson, and one visitor - her boyfriend. We know that she chooses her boyfriend to die. It's the ultimate victory of the cult.
And, we know how this scene is supposed to go. The townperson should be Pelle, the "friend" who tricked them all into coming to the commune, and has also been emotionally seducing her. She can choose who dies: the one who betrayed them all, or the man she can no longer trust. The boyfriend should be arguing for mercy or sanity, the superego voice trying to save itself. And after he says one particular thing wrongly, the newly empowered anti-heroine should deliver some cutting denouncement, like off with his head, etc etc. It's the ultimate showdown of the symbolic elements to cap this movie.
... and we don't get that at all. The non-boyfriend sacrificial possibility is a random cultist chosen by lottery who we've never talked to before. The boyfriend is drugged out of his gourd and sitting on a wheelchair slumped feebly, and doesn't say a word. And our heroine faces her choice with a grimace, but says nothing. She takes no action or agency on screen - the scene just cuts to the boyfriend being sewn into a bear to be immolated.
This is so weird. We are left to wonder, what did she say or do? Did she gladly call for her ex's blood, or did she just nod sheepishly? How can we even bring ourselves to feel emotion - either pity or anger - for the drugged out boy slumped over? Who even cares about random lottery dude and what does he represent?
It's a sharp turn into apathy, nihilism, and inertness for a film that was on such an unrelenting track until this point. It's like the filmakers just couldn't make the jump to actually connecting with the heroine's decision, or at least assumed the audience couldn't.
