Are you ok?

Rating: 7/10 (11 July 2019)

I found this film enjoyable and visually stunning, and also fun to think about. There are many critiques one could make - the unfortunate use of a "disabled" person as a signifier of corruption, the way the cliched way that the European non-Christian Other is sinister and sadistic.
But I will only talk about what I thought was the main theme, which came through pretty clearly-which is the contrast between two ways of dealing with trauma. The film starts with Dani's shocking trauma, and Christian's inability and unwillingness to engage her fear for her sister or her grief afterward. He interprets it, he tells her what to do, or he asks her, repeatedly, "are you OK?" without any actual empathy. Her trauma, as his friends point out, is a burden to him. When she feels real embodied physical pain from her grief and trauma, she always goes off to experience it alone--in the bathroom of his friends' apartment, in the bathroom on the plane, in the weird house during her mushroom trip. She has no one to hold her, no family, as Pelle tells her. Christian does not know how to comfort Dani; he just wants to ignore or talk away her suffering. His attempts to be with her--saying he probably won't go to Sweden at the party after getting the tickets, or offering to delay taking mushrooms, are not genuine. Her troubles are something for him to escape or manage, not to feel.
Once we get to Sweden, it becomes more important that Josh and Christian are anthropology grad students, as the movie enacts Renato Rosaldo's critique of his discipline in the classic article, "Death and a Headhunter's Rage." After witnessing a gruesome ritual, neither of them have an emotional response. They are interested in the ritual for only two reasons: 1) analyzing it's meaning or origins (and not much of this); and 2) as an opportunity for their own competitive ambitions. They cannot experience the emotional "force" of the ritual, and in fact appear to be emotionally dead--even motionless in the subsequent meal. Their professional ambitions make them unable to collaborate. They are loyal neither to each other nor to the values of their host community; Josh violates ethical standards by photographing the book, and Christian eagerly betrays him.
Rosaldo argued that only by experiencing intense emotional trauma after the death of his anthropologist wife in the field could he understand how Philippine Ilongot headhunters feel compelled by rage to respond to family members' deaths by hunting for a victim and taking their head; before that he just wanted to analyze or interpet this as a interesting piece of "culture."
The villagers, on the other hand, do not talk about each other's emotions or traumas; they experience them. Pelle tells Dani that he shares her grief because of his parents' death, but the theme really comes out in Harga. When one of the ritual suicides does not die in his fall, but writhes in pain with a smashed leg, they all moan and cry with him. When a drugged Christian consummates his destined tryst with Pelle's young sister, all the assembled women writhe together, sharing her sexual pleasure. In the fire, they all feel their comrade's pain as his legs are consumed.
During the dance, Dani finally feels pleasure and connection as she dances with the Harga women. She wants to share her joy with Christian, but he is completely oblivious (though he isn't entirely to blame here). But after she peeks through the keyhole and sees him having sex, she runs off as usual moaning. But the other Harga women don't console her; they share her emotional agony, mimicking all her sighs and anguished shouts.
There is a critique of Western society here; we are too isolated and emotionally disconnected to deal with trauma. We can talk about it, or label it; but lack the ability for true empathy that can only happen in a real community.
Of course, Dani is also a selfish jerk, just like the others, even though she is a psychology student and they study anthropology.
The film draws on a melange of different cultural tidbits and beliefs. When I lived in Mexico, I heard many stories of a similar "love potion" using pubic hair and fluids from the genitals; I believe that Clarence Thomas was referencing this folk belief when he joked about finding a pubic hair in his Pepsi.