Maria, Medea, and Midsommar: Part 1

The slow burn of feminine rage

To talk about Ari Aster’s Midsommar — most notably its final scene — is to talk about Maria Callas. 

In Aster’s 2019 folk-horror film, set in a woodsy Swedish commune of Hårga, only one of the four visiting Americans is left standing. Having been crowned May Queen as part of the Hårga’s annual midsummer festival, Dani (Florence Pugh) is now laden with flowers — her head emerging from a cape of them that makes her look like an herbaceous volcano. 

She is, likewise, burdened with a major decision: Every 90 years, the Hårga complete a ritual sacrifice of nine lives. They have eight already — including two of Dani’s compatriots — and now she needs to select the final body for the pyre: a Hårga member selected at random, or her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor). While the entire film up to this point has highlighted Dani’s dependency on Christian (informed, in part, by the PTSD of losing her parents and sister in a murder-suicide earlier that year), she last saw her feckless lover having se…