Florence Pugh has revealed that she and Midsommar director Ari Aster had very different views about the film’s shocking ending.
The Oscar nominee took the lead in the Hereditary filmmaker’s second feature-length project, which centred around Dani, a young woman who joins her boyfriend and his close-knit friendship group on a trip to a mysterious commune in rural Sweden.
As folk horror lore dictates, each of them is eventually killed in turn by members of the cult, until Florence’s character – who by the end of the film has been elected the new “May Queen” – selects her neglectful boyfriend as a final sacrifice to be burned alive.
The film ends with a striking close-up of Florence’s face, which slowly turns into a smile.
“I have a different version [of events] to Ari,” the We Live In Time star told Wired during a conversation with co-star Andrew Garfield about Midsommar.
“The idea is that she’s now gone through a psychotic break. From the moment she chooses – I believe accidentally – Christian, her boyfriend, to get burnt, she keeps on waking up [from] and going back into this psychotic break.
“When the end happens, where everything is going up in flames, I tried to embody what I was like when I was five on Bonfire Night. And just how exciting it was to see flames, and I wanted to revert back to a very small and simple life of how simple things made, and make, children feel. Because in that moment, I presumed she wasn’t there anymore.”
The leaked screenplay for Midsommar describes the final moments of the film as follows:
“A smile finally breaks onto Dani’s face. She has surrendered to a joy known only by the insane. She has lost herself completely and she is finally free. It is horrible and it is beautiful.”
Back in 2019 when Midsommar was released, Ari Aster told Entertainment Weekly that he sees the film’s ending as a kind of “perverse wish fulfillment” and “fantasy that was playing with a kind of catharsis that I hope people will have to wrestle with”.
“I hope it will also have people cheering and then maybe hopefully later on contending with that a little bit more,” he added.
Ari also told IGN that by the end of Midsommar, Dani has managed to “liberate herself from her ‘dead weight’” and find “a new family”, following the deaths of her biological family earlier in the film.
“For most of the people visiting this village, this community, this is a folk horror movie. But for Dani, for our main character, it’s a fairy tale,” he suggested.
Midsommar is available to stream now on Netflix.