How ‘Midsommar’ Easter eggs were always revealing Dani’s fate
The thing with Midsommar is that the ending is no mystery. For eagle-eyed viewers, the fate of Florence Pugh’s character, Dani, is revealed from the very beginning. Hiding in plain sight, the ending of Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror is on the screen repeatedly as Easter eggs throughout make it clear how the tale will end.
Revealing the ending to the film doesn’t even feel like a spoiler, given that the first clue comes literally seconds into the movie. The film opens with an instantly distressing scene as Dani’s sister kills their parents and herself. As the camera scans through the house at night in what is one of the old dark scenes in the unusually sunny horror film, viewers can spot a framed photo of Pugh’s character on her parent’s bedside table. However, the Easter egg lies in the fact that draped over the photo is a flower crown, foreshadowing Dani’s time in Sweden and the eventual crowning of her as the May Queen.
To some fans, this is more than a nod to what’s coming. Some have theorised that it’s a clue that the cult she falls into actually plotted the entire thing, suggesting that perhaps they even went so far as to kill Dani’s family in order to bring her to them. This could tie into the fact that her parents and sister’s spirits seem to follow her to Sweden as we see them flash behind her shoulders on the plane, and another blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment reveals her sister’s face in the trees as she’s carried towards her crowning ceremony.
The film’s ending is repeatedly referenced in various ways. Early on in the movie, as Dani lays grieving in her apartment while her boyfriend attempts to help her, the artwork above her bed shows a girl in a flower crown and a bear, foreshadowing the fiery finale.
But the Easter eggs in Midsommar aren’t just hinting at possible theories regarding the plot or even just cryptic clues about what is about to happen. Instead, they fully spell the plot out. Aster makes no secret about Dani’s fate; instead, he seems to make the point time and time again that it is inevitable. It makes the point that what happens to his protagonist is prophesied, and destiny is coming to fruition. That’s made clear in his director’s cut, where an image is displayed that also features on the vinyl of the movie’s soundtrack.
Laid out like an old tapestry, the image tells the entire story of the film, starting with the dark death of Dani’s family in winter, through to her boyfriend’s weak attempts to comfort her in the spring, to the deaths they witness in Sweden and ending with Dani becoming the May Queen.
Designed like one of the traditional ceremonial tapestries that hang on the walls of the guest house they stay in, it’s proof that this tale was written into the history of the cult and was always meant to be. It reminds the audience that what is to come is always coming as if these characters’ fate was written into folklore and legend long before the film started.
