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Pelle the Conqueror: Framing Midsommar as a Love Story

This article is now available on Audio, written by Dawn Kiefer and read by Laura Stewart, exclusively for our Patreon supporters. For just $3 a month you will have access to our full library of Audio content, plus three new uploads every week. To sign up visit our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/25YL

Dawn Kiefer is the editor of a weekly Southwest Wisconsin newspaper. She is a lifelong film enthusiast, particularly of psychological horror and the macabre, as well as an avid collector of vintage fashion dolls and paper dolls. Her university studies had an emphasis in journalism and art history. This is her first of three articles on Ari Aster’s Midsommar.


Much has been written about the astonishing acting performance by Florence Pugh as protagonist Dani Ardor in the 2019 folk horror film Midsommar, and rightly so. Pugh portrays a character deeply wracked by grief while walking on eggshells to maintain a withering relationship with her longtime boyfriend, Christian Hughes (Jack Reynor).

However, the entire film consists of scenes during which Dani reacts to external stimuli.

I posit that the primary impetus of the film is Swedish foreign exchange student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), who convinces a group of his university friends, which ultimately includes Dani, to accompany him to his rural home area in Sweden for their midsummer (spelled midsommar by Swedes) festival.

In addition to the film being categorized as folk horror, in keeping with such classics as the 1973 film The Wicker Man, director Ari Aster describes his film as “a dark fairy tale” and he, of course, is not wrong about that; after all, he WROTE it.

However, as of my second of four viewings of Midsommar, I got the notion that it’s also a love story. Subsequent viewings have deepened my conviction of that statement.

Each time I’ve viewed the film, I’ve noticed details I hadn’t previously. Additionally, after the first viewing, I have consistently kept my eyes on Pelle during scenes in which he’s featured. He exhibits nuanced behavior, gestures and facial expressions, which have convinced me that his character is in love with Dani. I believe that he and his “family” (actually a cult), the Hargas, have conspired to bring the American group, as well as a young British couple, to their village to fulfill its ceremonial needs during the midsommar festival. (I have laid out my hypothesis on the conspiracy in a separate essay, but for now, I will state my case for the story’s love angle.)

At the beginning of the film, the audience sees a five-panel mural that shows much of what will take place during the film. Until I belatedly found an image of this mural online, I didn’t realize how much information is actually contained in it. As the mural is only shown briefly onscreen, I noticed something different each time I saw the film. However, it wasn’t until the fourth viewing that I realized how prominently Pelle features in the mural.

The opening mural from Midsommar title screen

The first of the mural’s five frames depicts the death of Dani’s family. The second frame depicts what I believe to be the love triangle between Christian, Dani and Pelle. In that second frame, Pelle is shown sitting on a tree branch with his sketchbook, while Christian and Dani walk below. In the third frame, Pelle plays the flute while he leads, pied piper-style, the four American visitors (Dani, Christian, Mark [Will Poulter] and Josh [William Jackson Harper]) to his village. In the fourth frame, the group and Pelle, with the flute held like a phallic symbol, enter the village. The fifth and final frame depicts young women dancing around a maypole. Many other details can be seen in these frames.

The first time the audience sees Pelle in the film is during the scene when he, Christian, Mark and Josh are at a restaurant. Pelle is looking down at something he’s reading or working on while the others are talking about Dani. When Mark says that Christian should find someone who’d want to have sex once in a while, Pelle abruptly looks up and intently follows the conversation.

The next times Pelle is shown are at the party when Dani learns about the proposed trip to Sweden and later at the guys’ apartment. (Either the four guys are all roommates or else one or more are visiting the apartment; it’s not clear.) During both of those scenes, Pelle is the only one who smiles at Dani and speaks to her in a friendly, welcoming manner. At the apartment, when the other three have left the room, he tells Dani he’s glad she’s coming along.

During the brief scene onboard the jet taking them to Sweden, when Dani exits the restroom and passes by where Pelle is seated, he anxiously watches her; apparently concerned about her well-being.

During the drive from the airport to Pelle’s village, Mark asks why Swedish women are so beautiful. Josh responds that Viking men dragged “the best babes” back with them. Taking this statement as part of Aster’s mythology for the film, it could be inferred that Pelle is “dragging back the best babe” he found while on his pilgrimage to the USA.

Additionally, a photo of this driving scene shows an interesting divide. At the left of the shot, Mark in the front seat and Christian in the back are both noticeably tilted to the viewer’s left, while driver Pelle and Dani seated behind him are noticeably tilted to the viewer’s right. Given Aster’s meticulous attention to detail, I doubt this is happenstance.

Pelle, Dani in the back seat of the car with tension in the air

When Pelle and the four Americans reach his village, “family” member Odd affectionately greets Pelle and then says welcome to the Americans. However, to Dani alone, Odd says, “Welcome HOME.”

Having been told earlier by Dani that the group would arrive at his village on her birthday, Pelle surprises her with the gift of a lovely sketch he’s made of her. Pelle reminds Christian that it’s her birthday, but Christian’s feeble attempt to acknowledge that for Dani falls flat.

In scenes that follow it’s clear that Pelle keeps his eye on Dani. After the man and woman leap to their deaths from the Attestupa cliff, Christian nonchalantly lets Dani go off by herself to vent her anxiety and shock. But Pelle goes looking for her and finds her in the bunkhouse, where he tries to commiserate about their mutual loss of parents. He says that his parents “burned up in a fire,” although the circumstances are not explained. Pelle apologizes for letting her witness the Attestupa deaths and tells her that he is proud of his heritage and wanted to share it with friends he thought would appreciate it. He also tells her that he was the most excited for HER to come to his village. When Pelle holds and caresses her hand, she worries that Christian will walk in on them, but Pelle says that Christian is who he wants to talk with her about. Pelle asks her, “Do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?” The camera cuts away as a look of uncertainty plays across her face.

I sense that the above-described scene between Dani and Pelle is a skewed parallel to a scene earlier in the film between Dani and Christian, at her apartment. The dichotomy is that Dani pleaded with Christian to stay and talk with her, while later Pelle pleads with Dani to stay and talk with him.

In what I found to be an interesting display of body language, during an overhead shot of the bunkhouse interior, when everyone’s sleeping on separate cots, we see that Christian and Dani have their backs to one another, while Dani and Pelle are facing each other. I assert that the positioning of the characters is intentional and I wouldn’t be surprised if Pelle had placed a love rune under Dani’s bed, as Hargas “family” member Maja did with Christian’s. (I suspect that Josh was intended to see Maja do that, as a means to further enable the conspiracy that was underway.)

There are additional instances of Pelle’s apparent affection for Dani. These include a later scene of an intimate moment at the dining table when they’re seated next to one another. They briefly face each other, gazing at one another and smiling. A bit after that there’s a scene during which the audience sees that Pelle is drawing another sketch of her. After Dani is crowned May Queen, “family” members are shown hugging her or giving her a peck on the cheek. However, Pelle embraces both sides of her face and gives her a decidedly romantic lingering kiss on the lips. Later Pelle can briefly be seen in the background watching as Dani discovers Christian engaged in a mating ritual with Maja.

Shortly before Dani, as May Queen, is to choose the final sacrificial victim, one of the elders praises Pelle for bringing to the Hargas new blood (two of what ultimately proves to be three victims for the sacrificial fire) and for bringing their May Queen. Pelle has also been crowned, as some form of Green Man, I believe, and smiles happily when she is mentioned. I remind readers that, at the very end of the film, after the sacrificial victims have been consumed in flames, Dani smiles, too.

I would also like to point out that, twice, we see Dani hallucinating herself as rooted to the ground. I take that to mean that Dani feels that she’s “home.”

I can imagine some people reading the foregoing and not being convinced that the described behaviors add up to Pelle being in love with Dani. (Or, for that matter, that she’s in love with him.) I can only suggest that these persons see the movie again and consistently watch Pelle throughout and determine whether they see what I believe I did.

Written by Fraser Hamilton

Fraser is a Canadian writer and TV & pop music obsessive. He also eats too much pasta.

@frazham

13 Comments

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  1. I’m shocked that it would take a person more than one viewing of Midsommar to figure out that Pelle’s intention from the start was to coerce Dani into going back to Sweden with him. His intention in the film is to bring Swedish, Caucasian DNA into the cult, and Dani has that. There are several Scandinavian motif articles in the Ardor home which would indicate that this may be Dani’s family ethnicity. As the Swedes emigrated to the United States, mostly to Northern, Midwest cities in the late 1800s (notice that opening shot of a winter scene?), and there are hundreds of thousands of Scandinavians who still occupy this part of the country. So, Pelle’s choice to go to a predominantly Scandinavian-American part of the United States is no accident. It’s also no accident that the other Americans in the group meet their untimely deaths, except for Dani. Midsommar is a highly complex, and symbolic film that practically begs the viewer to look below the bright, daylight, flowery, surface elements of any utopian group, to find the real story, however dark and horrifying it may be.

  2. I guess I’m probably the only person who thinks Christian isn’t a bad guy. He clearly wanted to break up with Dani before her family died but stayed with her anyway so as not to add to her pain. He tried to help her thru her worst time with it. From the beginning he didn’t want to hurt her and even ignored friends advice to just dump her. They clearly just weren’t meant to be together but was this all his fault? People are either made to be together or not… break ups happen. Perhaps he should’ve just gone with his gut feeling and left Dani from the beginning. There it is…story over… and she could have moved on with Pelle.

  3. Ari Aster himself mentioned in an interview that no, Pelle did not have anything to do with Dani’s family’s death.

  4. Oh yeah absolutely. Pelle chooses her and I guess they are gonna rule the roost going forward. He’s a much better choice, except for the murdery bits.

    Do you guys think the cult orchestrated the death of dani’s parents? Or do you think that was a “happy accident” that gave Pelle a good mark for the seductive force of the Instagram cult?

  5. One of the scenes in the film which few people seem to notice or comment upon is the fact that near the end of the maypole dance sequence, Dani evidently begins speaking in Swedish to one of the other women when she shouldn’t be able to — and if it comes to that, the way in which the name “Dani” is spelled gives it a faintly Scandinavian flavor suggesting that it is her destiny and perhaps was all along to join the Harga. (Is it possible that when the men of the Harga go on their summer pilgrimage, they are expected to impregnate women in the hope that the children can eventually be lured back into the community to enrich the gene pool?)

    I realized right away that Pelle is probably attracted to Dani and entertains hopes that she will remain with the Harga (and with him). In my opinion, the scene following the attestupa in which Pelle follows Dani and tries to reassure her is very telling and gives you a lot of information about his intentions. Pelle is very attentive to and at least appears to be compassionate with Dani in a way that Christian is not (and possibly has never been). He sits beside her, takes her hand, and asks her if she feels “held” by Christian…doing everything short of putting his arms around her and literally holding her himself. Dani responds to Pelle’s behavior by pointing out that Christian could potentially pass by and see them through the open door (the unspoken implication being that on some level, she knows Pelle’s interest in her is more than just friendly and that this interaction with him is therefore not entirely appropriate even though her relationship with Christian is unsatisfying). It’s not that hard to see that Pelle is subtly attempting to seduce Dani away from Christian and toward the Harga (and him)…especially when he reiterates how happy he is that she came on the trip (even though she was not really supposed to).

    What’s tragic is that this scene also makes it clear to me that in a sense, Pelle is just as bad in his own way as Christian because he doesn’t actually take Dani’s feelings all that seriously either — he’s just much less harsh (and perhaps much less honest) about it — and tries to convince her that what he believes is best for him will be equally good for her too. I think that Pelle genuinely believes that he cares for Dani and that she can be happy with him…but it’s really not his place to make that decision for her. Many manipulators are not fully conscious of their own behavior and mistakenly label their attempts to control other people as an expression of love. (i like to think that as a psychology student, she might have realized this had she not been so profoundly traumatized by the loss of her family and the lack of sympathy from Christian.) Unfortunately, this rather self-serving assumption that what is best for one person ought to be and ultimately will be best for the other is not at all uncommon even among people who.are not part of a cult and it’s not limited to romantic relationships either. I suppose you could argue that Pelle is something of a fairytale prince in this context since he’s basically saving the “damsel in distress”…but fairytales come from a time in which women were not expected or indeed supposed to have much agency over their own lives and so it was implied that the heroine passively accepted the prince without question (especially since she “owed” him for rescuing her). it’s difficult to make a plausible case for the idea that Dani can truly live healthily as well as happily ever after with a community of people who use psychedelic drugs to weaken personal boundaries and who lure outsiders in under false pretenses every ninety years to become human sacrifices.

  6. Hello to those who commented. I only just now saw your comments. (It’s Oct. 30, 2019.)
    Johnathan, I have my own scenarios in my mind of how I would like for the story to be. In my mind, the Hargans only sacrifice people every 90 years. Aside from that, we do know that the Hargans lie, including Pelle. So, for my own scenarios, they’ve lied about many things, including: they don’t regularly leap from the cliff in the attestupa ritual. I think the deaths of the woman and man who did leap were set up, in order for them to be represented as the effigies who were said to be “already dedicated” for the burning sacrifice. Otherwise, their deaths would have been like so many others already undertaken in previous attestupa rituals. Also, a number of Hargans seen in the film sure look like they’re older than 72. I’m not even sure that Pelle’s parents actually died in a fire. The thought occurred to me that maybe Odd is Pelle’s father! They certainly have an emotional embrace when Pelle first encountered him upon his return to Harga. Anyway, as I said, these are only my thoughts. Ari Aster might get a laugh out of them! I am an avid defender of the Hargans and Pelle in particular.
    Raiden Louise, thank you for your kind words and I’m glad we share similar feelings about Pelle. Many people loathe him and consider him an evil villain. I see him as someone who knew what his family desperately needed to fulfill what, for them, is a form of religion. He would do anything for them. I believe he would do anything for Dani, too.
    noun h: I do believe that Pelle was involved in an intricate conspiracy which involved the necessary death of Mr. & Mrs. Ardor and Terri. My hypothesis is that Ulf flew to the US and killed those three. I contend that Ulf blew the paralyzing powder in their faces, set up the carbon monoxide trap, and sent Dani the e-mail message. One reason why I believe this is that, just before the burning sacrifice, an elder says to Ingemar and Ulf, “You have brought outside blood, thus sacrificing your own bodies.” We know that Ingemar brought Simon and Connie. Who did Ulf bring? I say that the deaths of Dani’s parents and sister set in motion the rest of the plot, which resulted in the four Americans agreeing to go to Harga. If Dani wouldn’t go, Christian quite likely wouldn’t have either. And if Dani’s family was still alive, she likely wouldn’t have agreed to go.
    Laura, Odd is the one who says those things to Dani. However, later in the film, Pelle says to Dani, “Yet I was most excited for YOU to come!”
    Jack, as I wrote earlier in this long response, my own thought is that the Hargans have lied about a lot of things. I don’t necessarily believe they really all die by no later than age 72. I said more about this above.
    I will conclude this by saying that I am a defender of the Hargans, especially Pelle. From what Ari Aster has said, he based them on a mixture of actual and mythical European customs and rituals. I believe that the Hargans are basically descendants of Vikings. Thus, if someone sees them as being evil, it’s only insofar as Vikings were evil. In any case, killing has been done in the name of religion for just about forever. Additionally, it galls me that many people are so critical of the Hargans and yet they watch all kinds of other films in which countless people are mowed down with machine guns and slashed with knives, etc., ad nauseum.

  7. @Johnathan Hoff: The Great Feast occurs every 90 years, however the life cycle of the Hargas is 72 years; I imagine this means that some Hargas do not get to witness the Great Feast in their lifetime, making it such a special and revered tradition.

  8. I totally felt this article, and realised the same thing on my second viewing. At first I thought it was all to do with tradition, that she was selected as a perfect breeding partner in the village, and that yes, perhaps Pelle was selected as her partner, but I never saw the emotion in it, until the second viewing. Then it’s incredibly apparent. This sub-plot makes me cry, as I completely relate to what Dani was going through… where you literally are left with nobody, apart from one person, who clearly doesn’t want to be there either. And to see it again, and realise the deep love Pelle has for Dani, and how he literally sweeps in, picks her up, and saves her, is just beautiful to watch.

  9. Loved the breakdown quickly becoming a favorite film with each rewatch….. only unanswered question… is it every year for 90year… every year, every 72 years… not exactly clear how long and how often … contradictions

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