Forget 'East of Eden,' HBO Max's Psychological Thriller Is Florence Pugh's Finest Hour
Erik Hawkins is an award-winning writer and editor who's been obsessed with cinema since he was old enough to hold Roger Ebert's Video Home Companion in his hands. He lives in NYC, where he rabidly watches everything from the newest releases to the more odd and obscure, and regularly shares his thoughts on Letterboxd. From ghost-writing fiction and webisodes in South America to local news, trial coverage, and politics in NYC, he's rarely put down his laptop over the past 15 years.
Between her work in indie films like Lady Macbeth, mega-blockbusters like Dune, and even Park Chan-Wook's masterpiece of a miniseries The Little Drummer Girl, Florence Pugh has emerged as one of Hollywood's most talented young actors astonishingly quickly. And with Pugh already receiving plaudits for her role as Cathy Ames in Zoe Kazan's new adaptation of Steinbeck's East of Eden, it's worth looking back at what was arguably her finest hour: Ari Aster's 140-minute panic attack Midsommar.
Aster's films are largely known for their pitiless and antiseptic approach to human misery, and it's Pugh's raw performance as Dani that supplies this day-lit cult thriller with enough humanity to make it bearable, let alone enjoyable. Just 23 at the time, Pugh demonstrated unbelievably realistic registers of numbness and pure, raw anguish. It also helps that the film is a triumph of art direction and mood, and one of the few Hollywood films to get the psychedelic experience right — even if it's to horrific ends.
'Midsommar' Finds Terror In the Sunshine
Midsommar was a swerve visually, if not tonally, for Aster following the satanic familial horror of Hereditary, in which many of the film's most disturbing images were literally so buried in shadow, it could take multiple viewings to catch them. Here, Pugh joins her rotten, manipulative boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his buddies on a trip to a remote region of Sweden in the midst of a month when the sun never sets, and a nine-day pagan festival is about to kick off. Dani is reeling from the murder-suicide of her entire family (horrifically depicted at the top of the film) and is pressured into eating psilocybin mushrooms upon arriving at the blindingly bright commune. Aster manages to crank up the horror here purely from the (realistic) visual effects of the drug, social anxiety, and oppressive brightness of the natural landscape.
And even when Midsommar veers into some very graphic violence, it's presented matter-of-factly, almost cheerfully, with nothing left in shadow or for the imagination to fill in. It makes for an entirely unique horror experience, howling with psychological pain, swirling with psychedelic colors, and ending with the frailty and horrible squishy reality of the human body. A late-film reveal of one largely innocent character's fate is one of the most bloodcurdling images ever to grace an American multiplex screen — seemingly an ongoing goal of Aster's.
Florence Pugh Masterfully Radiates Humanity and Pain
For such a young actor, Pugh does things with her face, body, and voice in this film that are simply astonishing. Although the initial trauma Dani suffers skirts the edge of being almost too horrific, Pugh perfectly embodies varying stages of grief, the empty numbness of complete depression, and howling agony throughout the film. It's almost too painful to bear, watching Christian manipulate her as he quite openly continues the miserable relationship only because it would be "cruel" to break it off after the tragedy Dani's suffered. And when Dani witnesses a drugged Christian involved in the "mating" part of the commune's festival, and finally lets loose with pure pain and horror while female cultists mimic her, you feel Pugh's performance in your bones.
Midsommar is somewhat infamous for its climax, so we will veer clear of further spoilers. Suffice to say, however, that Dani witnesses the unthinkable, and Aster trusts Pugh's face to do a tremendous amount of work as the audience studies her. Horror, madness, and a kind of blissful satisfaction all come through in both the music and her expressions — and it's an overpowering ending in every sense.
While Pugh's most recent work in East of Eden just premiered on Netflix, her all-timer work in the horror genre can be found on HBO Max, where Midsommar is now streaming.
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