Midsommar has never really left our minds since its release in July 2019, and now that Ari Aster is coming back with Beau Is Afraid, you might also be thinking about his brilliant second movie again.
Aster's follow-up to Hereditary centres on couple Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) who, if we're being polite, aren't exactly in the best place in their relationship – and things are only about to get worse.
The setting might be a Swedish midsummer festival during a bright Scandinavian summer, but Midsommar is as dark as they come for horror movies with a finale that will haunt your dreams, as well as leaving you with some major questions.
So whether you're delving into Midsommar for the first time or going back for a traumatic rewatch, we're here to help explain any lingering questions you might have, especially about why Dani does what she does.
Major spoilers ahead, of course.
Midsommar ending explained
Midsommar is essentially a two-and-a-half-hour study of one woman's emotional journey towards emancipation from a toxic relationship. The film has a happy ending, more or less.
Even though it might seem seem like a confusing, bleak and fairly extreme decision to kill someone for cheating, there's a bit more to it than that. Aster spends most of the film showing us how terrible Dani's relationship is, rather than revelling in the spookiness of horror clichés.
We see how casually horrible her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) is, dismissing her worries about her family then barely helping her through the grieving process, almost abandoning her to go on holiday with his mates, before grudgingly bringing her along.
Oh, and once there, he totally forgets her birthday. If this was Love Island he would have been pied off after the first recoupling.
Still, Dani's priority is keeping him happy, which she does by apologising frequently and saying 'thank you' at inappropriate times – hiding her true pain, crying in solitude.
Having lost her biological family, Dani is hanging on to the closest thing she has left – her relationship, putting up with some gross friends in the process (friends who will eventually vanish one by one).
Christian is so selfish he makes Dani stay with a strange Swedish Pagan group, even after it's revealed they're a suicide cult, because he wants to write a thesis on their culture. Like, read the room, bro.
However, that culture involves the election of a May Queen, via a trial by maypole, with the last dancer left standing the winner. This is an extremely important sequence – it's the first time we see Dani truly happy and part of a community. Even if she is a bit baffled by the end result, which feels either set up or pre-ordained by fate.
After a special dinner, where Dani still shows some concern for Christian, asking if she can bring him with her for the next part of the ceremony, the couple are separated. Christian takes the opportunity to run off with a red-haired girl, who wants him to impregnate her (surrounded by a group of naked people who look like they've wandered in from the set of Hereditary).
Dani witnesses the coupling and is comforted by a group of women, who instigate a strange screaming and breathing exercise, with the gang surrounding her and reflecting her pain, copying her shudders and howls.
This is another extremely important sequence in terms of setting up the ending. Where Dani was once forced to hide her tears and her sobs for fear of being a burden, Dani's grief is being acknowledged and shared by the people in her community.
This is why, when faced with the choice between sacrificing her boyfriend and a random member of a community she’s only been a part of for four days, she chooses to kill her boyfriend. She has a new family who will support her through her pain.
Following the movie's release, Aster explained that he was inspired by a recent break-up to write the movie as a "perverse wish fulfilment".
"I hope it will also have people cheering and then maybe hopefully later on contending with that a little bit more," he added of the shocking ending. "I say, 'F**k it, just enjoy it'. But, there should be an aftertaste to the uplift, I guess."
As for why Christian is sewn into a bear for the sacrifice, it’s either a reference to Nicolas Cage's bear costume in The Wicker Man remake (with the original Wicker Man being a clear influence on Aster here) or it's to underline the fact we're watching a fairytale.
The movie begins with a storybook illustration laying out the whole film, and there's artistic foreshadowing throughout that this is a dark take on a Hans Christian Andersen-style story (though he was Danish, not Swedish).
Think of the painting in Dani's apartment of a little girl touching a bear – an illustration of the 'The Walk of Innocence' by Helena Nyblom, a fairy story about a young woman who kisses a bear and feels sorry for him.
There's no sympathy here, of course, with Dani’s reaction to Christian’s death being a big grin. She has reached catharsis by confronting her fear of loss, finding a new family to help her through the aftermath.
Midsommar is available to watch on Netflix.
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