So, I saw Midsommar last night.
Midsommar is Ari Aster’s second movie (he’s the guy that directed Hereditary). It follows four American students going on a vacation/study break to see a 9-day-long Swedish midsummer festival.
Dani, the main character, has just gone through a family tragedy and is now traumatised because of it. Her boyfriend invited her to the trip two weeks before him and his friends left, much to his friends’ dismay.
Dani’s boyfriend’s friends all seem to be very self-centred and extremely apathetic. Their reaction to her joining them on the trip is basically “aaaww man, she’s so depressed, she’s going to be such a drag”. They peer pressure her into doing drugs, pretty much force her into staying after the first horrific event of the movie happens, and then wonder why she acts so anxious and depressed all the time.
This is a very slow-paced movie. It takes about an hour for the first properly horrible thing to happen. I do feel like a good 40 minutes of this film could have been edited out and it would have been fine, as this movie does feel extremely self-indulgent at certain points.
I honestly felt that this film was more gory than scary. A lot of graphic things happen to a lot of characters, and they were obviously put in there to add to the shock factor of the film. But I didn’t really leave the film scared or traumatised. Maybe that’s just the cynical side of me talking, but I personally just don’t really get scared by stuff like that.
There were a lot of mass hysteria scenes in this film, particularly towards the end. The villagers seemed to join in with other people’s emotional experiences. All I can really say without spoiling everything is that there’s one especially striking scene where all of the younger women from the village join in with Dani when she starts crying, and it was one of the strangest scenes I’ve ever seen in a horror film so far.
Obviously, it must be noted that there are other films like this already out there. The Wicker Man is probably the most well-known out of all of them, both the original and the Nicholas Cage remake. I like to think that Ari Aster added some specific scenes as references to these other films (but I really can’t mention them without spoiling the movie, sorry). While there are other movies that explore the topic of midsummer rituals, this is definitely the first one that I’ve seen take it to this level of gore and insanity.
Midsommar is a visually striking masterpiece of a movie, but it’s one of those Marmite movies. You’re either going to love it or hate it. Chances are, if you didn’t like Hereditary, you’re not going to like this. I’d definitely recommend every horror fan to at least check it out, even if you don’t like Aster’s other work. Midsommer feels more like an experience as opposed to a movie, and I think it’s something that everyone should experience at least once.
7/10
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