Dani’s interest in the Hårga begins with the way the Hårga women look, and her progressive entry into their group is demonstrated through her adoption of their costume. Aster’s vision of the natural world emphasises flowered fields, fecund forests, and pale stone cliffs aglow with sunlight, a jarring contrast to the film’s selective moments of extreme gore. A deeper reading of the film’s aesthetics and elevation of beauty as a value is vital to understanding the cultural significance of Midsommar. Midsommar’s ending is more than a symbolic self-assertion of power, or a trite allegory about ‘inner beauty’ given genre treatment. In an act of revenge, she selects Christian and symbolically steps into her new community. Dressed in a body-swallowing gown made of flowers, she chooses a human to be sacrificed in the ritual that traditionally closes the celebrations. During the film’s last act, the group’s “pageantry” quite literally cocoons Dani in a metamorphosis that is simultaneously ornamental and emotional. The Hårga, on the other hand, reciprocate Dani’s admiration, and after a series of rituals she wins the cult’s highest honour: she is crowned May Queen after she outdances her competitors. Instead, he treats her grief over the traumatic deaths of her family as burdensome and repulsive. Her enchantment is, to an extent, a response to the fact that Christian does not find her beautiful. Introduced to the group by Pelle, a fellow student who grew up on the commune, Dani is swiftly drawn in by the way the Hårga revere emotional experience and collectively share in its expression, finding the entangled visual and emotional customs of the Hårgan women “beautiful”. Soon after, Dani joins her emotionally abusive boyfriend – the provocatively named Christian – and several of his friends, all anthropology graduate students, on a research trip to Sweden to study this pagan commune, the Hårga, during their Midsommar celebrations. “I see what you mean about the pageantry,” remarks Dani (Florence Pugh) in Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) as she scrolls through photos of women lounging in a field, wearing embroidered dresses and flower crowns.
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