An A24 pictures, ‘Midsommar’, written and directed by Ari Aster who is well renowned for the award winning ‘Hereditary’ opens this narrative with an extremely unsettling suicide causing unbearable devastation, reflecting on a dark and eerie tone in this opening titles sequence.
Firstly, my own first expectation from the very beginning is that of death; from the very start, the audience is met with very symbolic characters and colors that represent something awful has taken place through the use of the firemen and the very ominous colors of blue and red that instantly are associated with tragedy and even death. The beginning shows a slow motion of two firemen each seemingly turning off the engine of two separate cars, instantly revealing the idea that there has been an accident with a gas leak perhaps from the association from their uniforms in relation to their actions, which I further exemplified through the eerie non-diegetic soundtrack playing simultaneously to the action that is taking place. All of this combined just within the first few seconds instantly introduces an extremely dark and sinister tone that is further extended through the elongated duration of the continuously moving camera shot which later reveals the first two distinguishable characters positioned ‘asleep’ in bed, yet the presence of the two firemen approaching the sleeping couple met the audiences expectations of their tragic death which is further established through the next clip of their grotesque bodies being zipped up in a body bag which again settles the nerving and ominous mood of this clip.
This journey we as an audience are being taken on through the experience of the firemen is further explored as they venture through the house as the mid shot begins our focus of the body bags being carried out, to the third distinguishable character being introduced. Positioned central to the long shot and placed on the floor leaning against a desk containing an open laptop on, it soon becomes clear that It is this character's actions that primarily lead up to the event at which we are following although we are unsure over the circumstances and context, making it slightly difficult to captivate our engagement due to our momentary confusion of the situation. However, as the slow, eerie track zooming into an extreme close up of this character, we soon realize the intentional decision of these deaths which hugely amplifies audiences' empathy for the situation and its dark nature. The dim and cold colors of this scene further mirror the sinister nature of this event, which again connotes the prediction we as an audience have for the expansion of this event to gain more understanding and knowledge of the context leading up to the numerous deaths already which also poses to question of this opening scene as being either a flash back or flash forward.
Our focus is then shifted from the unpleasant image of this character's expressionless face to a computer screen focusing in on a notification reading from ‘Dani Ardor’ which links through into the next scene of a man walking through the snow as he approaches a diegetic moaning like scream which again threads through into the next scene of this same man comforting the screams owner on a sofa. This telling of heart felt pain and emotion coming from the pleonastic moan of the final character creates the prediction of her close relation to the deaths already examined previously. This diegetic moaning intertwined with the non-diegetic eerie soundtrack works to unsettle the audience and morph my own predictions onto the focus of this character as opposed to our previous focus on the dead bodies. As the camera slowly pans towards the characters, they stay vocal in our focus positioned central to the shot with many symmetrical methods and thus making this end scene so prominent in unnerving audiences through this witness of an inconsolable breakdown.
This switch in location from the first house to outside snowing and finally to another house embodies the notion that each of these locations and their owners are connected on a personal level somehow and the major event from the first location evidently impacted the characters in the next locations, which began to develop audience members engagement through the gradual hints of connections that we are skillfully given.
The seriously distressing nature of each of these shots into the final and most prominent shot filmed slowly zooming into an abyss of snow and darkness outside of the window, as the camera almost completely ignores the unsettling scene. We are next introduced to the opening titles of the director and the cast members:
I felt this opening title sequence was extremely successful in engaging an audience in an unconventional way; as an audience member, my engagement was clasped throughout the sequence purely through the distressing nature of each of these shots which I found quite suffocating for an ‘outsider’ witness looking into the most distressing and awful moment anyone could go through, almost an intrusion of these characters privacy due to the unconventional nature of the camera movement and angles.
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