WARNING: SPOILERS FOR MIDSOMMAR AHEAD. Ari Aster’s second horror movie after Hereditary was just as disturbing and visually stunning as its predecessor. But it turns out that the writer/director disagrees with his star Pugh, over Dani’s decision for her boyfriend Christian to be the ninth sacrifice. Clearly, her character was extremely distressed and upset after catching him having sex with a member of the cult, only adding to how poor a boyfriend he’d been to Dani throughout the movie.
Now the May Queen, drugged up and verging on insanity, she was asked if Christian or another villager chosen at random should be the ninth and final sacrifice to burn in the temple.
However, the audience never saw her decision, only Christian being put into a hollowed-out bear carcass and burnt alive with the other sacrifices as Dani watches on with a crazed smile of judgement on him.
Speaking with USA Today, Pugh revealed she played Dani as though she didn’t realise what was happening in her insanity.
The 23-year-old said: “I thought it would be so interesting to have the love of her life in the building and she’s a kid looking at a firework.”
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She added: “That’s how I imagined it, saying, ‘This is someone that’s completely gone now. She doesn’t realize what’s going on, and she’s just really happy the fire is going up.’ So when we shot it, that’s what I was trying to get at.
“That’s what made the ending possible [for me] I don’t think I would’ve supported Dani as much if she knew that he was in there.
“I don’t think anybody is that sinister. You’re not going to watch your boyfriend cheat and be like, ‘Burn!’ I know Christian was a bit of a [expletive], but I didn’t want her to be evil at the end.”
Aster, disagreeing with Pugh said: “I wouldn’t agree with there ever being an iteration of the movie where she didn’t know he was burning.”
Aster added: “But there were a lot of scenes that were cut, and probably a few that helped illustrate she was losing her grip on her sanity, which you hopefully still see.”
Comparing Midsommar to Hereditary, the director admitted they were connected thematically.
He told Fandango: “I also feel that both films kind of deal with codependency, in a way, although this film goes deeper into that.
“I would say Hereditary absolutely was a horror film, unabashedly, and this film is, I am very careful to call it an adult fairy tale. That’s what this is. This is an adult contemporary fairy tale.”
Midsommar is out now.