A bit more engaging than "Suspiria."

Rating: 5/10 (17 November 2019)

"The Witch" was a bit too Avant Garde or "Artsy-Fartsy" for me; it was interesting, even intriguing at times, but had too much desolation symbolism for the average viewer to make sense of much of anything, ostensibly to "make the audience think, question and wonder" about what it all means. Throwing in a Satanic goat here and there is nothing new. David Lynch, as much as I liked half of his movies, is the ultimate director god of this genre. It's a precarious fine line, like many of Bob Dylan's songs, between the artist bringing authentic and mythological meaning to contemporary problems in timeless fashion vs. bogging down into the drainless swamp of the individual's neurosis, most notably exemplified in the older philosophers, such as Nietzsche, who we must extricate the pathological depression from the gems of timeless wisdom regarding the human condition. There is a limited number of explanations available for psycho-phantasmagorical movies: the government, aliens, a dream, the devil, a hallucinogen, the matrix, purgatory etc. (did I miss any?). All of these are copouts, and why the TV series "Lost" imploded upon itself. Most movie audiences are not stupid and will know when they can or cannot suspend disbelief. This will be felt as boredom and an overall sense of stupidity, regret and anger for paying the high cost of the ticket. While slow at times, "Midsommer" does not betray the exciting premise, fortitude and engaging drama of the original "Wicker Man," slowly leading the audience to more subtle and nuanced veils of what is true and what is not. Currently, I am halfway in, hoping the film does not degrade itself by indulging in the "limited explanations" described above. Unfortunately, the trauma story of one of the main characters does not weave perceptibly into the whole, and the movie makers would have been wise to apply a Gestalt to this film: the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, an almost fatal flaw, gladly resuscitated by the quality of the script, the direction and the performance of the young, talented actors. However, I'll just be honest, in the Nicolas Cage remake of the "Wicker Man," as he burning alive in sacrifice for the harvest, there is a strong part of me that wishes, half on fire, he would have catapulted from the upper chamber, broke his arm, and ran screaming to the ocean, diving in, and after bashing his body on the rocks, clinging on, barely clinging on, only to pass out and awake half buried in a crag covered with seaweed and vowing his revenge, then surreptitiously crawling among the salty rocks and breaking into a warehouse-closed for harvest season, replete with all the necessary things required to recover and then turn the island into sausage proper. How much better would that have been? If only the actors, producers, directors and everyone else creating the stage had the vision of a revenge redressed! Okay, now it has dragged on for over 45 minutes, with the main character having orgies and more. I feel the ghost of Nicholson's "The Passenger," and "A passage to India" now-a boredom resembling a sand dune. And so, in the final analysis, don't bother with this one.