‘Midsommar’

FLOWER crowns get really sinister in ‘Midsommar’ (2019). The Ari Aster folk horror ensuring nobody befriends visiting Swedes ever again.

Starring Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper and Will Poulter, ‘Midsommar’ begins with the kind of familial tragedy that keeps an American couple holding on by a thread together while Pugh’s Dani Ardor stifles her anguish in aeroplane bathrooms.

This, because her studiedly oblivious and gaslighting boyfriend Christian insists on accompanying his friends to Sweden where they will be attending a midsummer festival in an ancestral commune at theinvitation of their Swedish friend Pelle.

The film’s first mushroom trip sets the nightmarish tone. A deep dive into daytime horror where a cult ofsmiling Swedes dress like milkmaids, drink trippy tea and dance around maypoles as their visiting guests disappear one by one.

Atmospheric, beautifully shot with daylight illuminating the kind of gruesome scenes usually tempered by horror’s traditional dark, ‘Midsommar’ is unflinching in its depiction of its terrors, death scenes and revenge and is not for the fainthearted or particularly squeamish.Drawing on aspects of fairy tales while contrasting the keening, visceral elements of loss with a flower adorned welcoming of death, Aster intrigues visually but his plot is plagued by holes, thin motivations and a mostly terrified treatment of women. Unsettling and overlong, ‘Midsommar’ is a strange experience by a refreshingly ambitious director.

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