movie review of midsommar

One thing is certain: writer/director Ari Aster comprehends stifling dread in the most profound sense. Via a grief-soaked story of ancestral vulnerability (you can’t pick your relatives, can you?), his terrifying and startlingly confident debut “ Hereditary ” proved as much. Sure, the film’s demonic mythology, skillfully gory images and creepy miniature models cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski ’s camera fiendishly navigated were all stuff of nightmares. But equally frightening in “Hereditary” was the grudge-filled and deeply claustrophobic domestic helplessness Aster infused into every shot and line of dialogue.

The filmmaker fidgets with that peculiar breathlessness once again throughout “Midsommar,” a terrifically juicy, apocalyptic cinematic sacrament that dances around a fruitless relationship in dizzying circles. We are not stuffed inside a cavernous house of horrors this time around. But be prepared to feel equally suffocated by a ravenous family (albeit, a chosen, cultish kind) all the same. In the midst of wide-open pastoral surroundings we may be, but Aster still wants us to crave and kick for oxygen, perhaps in a less claustrophobic and more agoraphobic fashion. The tangible dread in “Midsommar”—oftentimes alleviated by welcome flashes of comedy, always charged by tight choreography and Pogorzelski’s atmospheric compositions—is so recognizably out of “Hereditary” that you’ll immediately distinguish the connective headspace responsible for both tales.

And yet, this superb psychedelic thriller sowed somewhere amid an outdoorsy “ mother! ,” a blindingly lit “ Dogville ” and fine, a contemporary “The Wicker Man,” is different by way of Aster’s loosened thematic restraint. You won’t exactly feel lost while disemboweling Aster’s inviting beast, but you can certainly argue that the sun never sets on the film’s cosmically vast subject matter: reaping notions of (white) male privilege, American entitlement (that literally pisses on what’s not theirs) and most prominently, female empowerment. And this is also a fitting way to describe the location where most of the story unfolds, under nearly 24-hour sun. We are in a remote, hidden-from-view Swedish village nested somewhere in Hälsingland, among tranquilly dressed Hårga folk who celebrate summer through initially quaint, but increasingly bizarre and downright petrifying rituals. There is only a slack sense of yesterday and tomorrow in Aster’s locale of choice where an endless string of hallucinatory traditions are exercised in broad daylight.

The folkloric practices start off appealingly enough—a misleading gust of peace (superbly countered by The Haxan Cloak’s skin-crawling score) breezes in the air while heady drugs dissolve in tempting cups of tea. But how did we even get here and find ourselves among these hippy-dippy proceedings cloaked in white linen? Well, we followed Florence Pugh , Aster’s second fearless female lead after Toni Collette , playing a grieving character marked by something unspeakable. In a deeply scarred, emotionally unrestricted performance—you might hear her screams in your nightmares—Pugh plays Dani, a graduate student aiming to put some distance between herself and an extreme case of trauma involving her bipolar sister. (A stunning prologue unravels the details of the tragic ordeal with top-shelf narrative economy.) And Dani isn’t on her own. In fact, she embarks upon the picturesque Scandinavian adventure as an outsider at first, tagging along some fellow scholars of academia, a group that includes her self-absorbed longtime boyfriend Christian ( Jack Reynor , convincingly egotistical). Also in the clan are Christian’s buddies Josh ( William Jackson Harper )—headed to the festivities for academic research—the blabber-mouthed Mark ( Will Poulter , so hysterically douchey that he earns the jester’s cap he’d wear later on), and Pelle ( Vilhelm Blomgren ), the brainchild of the operation as well as a member of the makeshift family that would host the group.

When the clique arrives in Sweden and joins others alongside Connie and Simon, a couple played by Ellora Torchia and Archie Madekwe respectively, Aster forgoes the aforesaid narrative economy for something sinister. Aided by production designer Henrik Svensson ’s deceptively simple work and Andrea Flesch ’s distressingly repetitive, angelically Nordic-embroidered costumes, he establishes a creepy sense of being stuck amid compartmentalized fields of boxy sleeping huts, triangular temples and elaborate dining settings. Soon enough (but never hurriedly), the flower-power euphoria thins out in “Midsommar.” Victimized people vanish one after the other and giggles assume an even more uncomfortable dimension—you will reach the climax of your sniggers during a truly hilarious mating ceremony that puts the last nail in the coffin of Dani’s doomed relationship with Christian. It all sounds crazy, but you can barely blame the clueless tourists for not making a more concerted effort to escape, or at least to decipher the cult’s ulterior motives. The sneaky hex Aster casts has that tight a grip, on both the characters and the audience.

Some will be troubled by the excess in “Midsommar.” The unburdened surplus of lengthy customs does overshadow some of the film’s potentially ripe avenues of interest, such as the scholarly rivalry between Christian and Josh, as well as racial dynamics that are only briefly hinted at. But the invigorating reward here is the ultimate sovereignty you will find in Dani, a surrogate for any woman who ever excused an inconsiderate male, rationalized his unkind words or thoughtless non-apologies. Pugh knows it in the film’s liberating final shot. And you will know it too, so intensely that her freedom might just feel like therapy.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

Florence Pugh as Dani
Jack Reynor as Christian
Will Poulter as Josh
William Jackson Harper as Mark
Anna Åström as Karin
Lucian Johnston

Cinematographer

Pawel Pogorzelski
The Haxan Cloak

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'Midsommar' Shines: A Solstice Nightmare Unfolds In Broad Daylight

Justin Chang

Loss, grief and emotional neglect all play a role in Midsommar â a haunting thriller about an American couple attending a mysterious festival in the Swedish countryside. Csaba Aknay/A24 hide caption

Loss, grief and emotional neglect all play a role in Midsommar â a haunting thriller about an American couple attending a mysterious festival in the Swedish countryside.

In the viscerally unnerving films of Ari Aster, there's nothing more horrific than the reality of human grief. His haunted-house thriller, Hereditary , followed a family rocked by traumas so devastating that the eventual scenes of devil-worshipping naked boogeymen almost came as a relief. Aster's new movie, Midsommar , doesn't pack quite as terrifying a knockout punch, but it casts its own weirdly hypnotic spell. This is a slow-burning and deeply absorbing piece of filmmaking, full of strikingly beautiful images and driven less by shocks than ideas. It's not interested in frightening you so much as seeping into your nervous system.

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Director ari aster says 'hereditary' is a family drama at its core.

And like Hereditary , Midsommar is very much rooted in loss. It begins with a young American woman named Dani, played by the great English actress Florence Pugh, panicking over a family emergency that moves swiftly toward its worst possible outcome. As she tries to pick up the broken pieces of her life, Dani seeks solace from her boyfriend, Christian, and is surprised to learn that he's about to go on a trip with some of his grad-school buddies. They're headed to a remote Swedish commune that is holding a nine-day festival to observe the summer solstice. Dani presses him about why he didn't tell her earlier, and an argument ensues.

The handsome Irish actor Jack Reynor clues you in to the selfishness beneath Christian's quiet, sensitive-sounding demeanor. Dani doesn't know that he was about to end their four-year relationship before tragedy struck, and he's only staying with her now out of a sense of obligation. Christian reluctantly invites her to join him in Sweden, and she accepts, to the irritation of some of his friends, who don't want his mopey girlfriend along to spoil their fun.

They fly to Sweden and, after a few hours' drive, arrive at a remote, centuries-old village where they are greeted by about 60 men and women wearing white robes embroidered with mysterious symbols. They are known as the Hårga, and they invite their American guests to participate in each day's festivities, which include lavish feasts, silent meditations, exhausting maypole dances and the consumption of various mind-altering drugs. Aster has a gift for dreaming up fictitious subcultures, and he visualizes these ancient customs and artifacts with an almost anthropological attention to detail. The Hårga seem benevolent enough at first, and there's something comforting about their strange rituals and their intimate communion with nature.

But then the mood takes a sinister turn and Dani and Christian's traveling companions start to disappear. The story owes a clear debt to The Wicker Man , Robin Hardy's 1973 horror classic about a pagan fertility cult, but Midsommar is more ambiguous and slower to come into focus. This is a nightmare that unfolds in broad daylight, under a midnight sun that bears down relentlessly on the landscape. The sun could almost be a metaphor for Dani's grief, something ever-present and all-consuming, especially since Christian seems to take so little interest in consoling her.

Aster has said that he was inspired to write Midsommar after the end of a long-term relationship, and that Dani's experience is a fictionalized version of his own. Whatever the real-life details, he's made the ultimate bad-boyfriend movie, a withering portrait of emotional neglect that has nothing nice to say about Christian, his petty-minded friends or, indeed, the state of contemporary American masculinity.

Among other things, Midsommar is a wickedly funny movie about the clash between pagan traditions and the ways of the modern world. One of its more provocative notions is that Dani may in fact be better off with the Hårga, with their seemingly selfless, utopian way of life. Sex and death, a source of so much pain and anxiety in the outside world, are here just part of life's unending cycle.

Midsommar is in no rush to solve its many mysteries. The third act is full of surreal images of revelry and ritual sacrifice, plus a sex scene that's as hilarious as it is appalling. What you remember most is Pugh's quietly mesmerizing performance. Your sympathies are with Dani at every moment, and so are the movie's. Toward the end she fixes the camera with an extraordinary look of terror and exultation, as she beholds the stunning fate that awaits her. Her story may begin in heartbreak and end in madness, but Aster ensures that she gets the last laugh.

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‘Midsommar’ Review: The Horror of Bad Relationships and Worse Vacations

Ari Aster’s hyper-aware movie builds a scary mousetrap with Swedish bait, but it has more virtuosity than vision.

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‘Midsommar’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director ari aster narrates a sequence from his film, featuring florence pugh..

“My name is Ari Aster, and I am the writer and director of “Midsommar.” This scene directly succeeds a scene in which our protagonist, Dani, played by Florence Pugh, is pressured into taking mushrooms. She recently suffered a very, very serious loss and is probably not in the best place to take psychotropic drugs.” “Can you feel that, the energy coming up from the earth?” “A big challenge that we took on in this film was putting the spectator into the experience of somebody going through a mushroom trip. This is the first scene that kind of introduces psychedelic elements in the film that will be more prevalent later on.” “Look, the trees too, they’re breathing.” “There’s a lot of sound design work here that’s also helping bring us into her subjectivity. When she looks up at the tree, we notice that the tree now seems to be bending and warping, that the texture seems to be moving. As I was working with the visual-effects artists on these shots, we managed to experiment a lot and find what was too much and what was not enough.” “You guys are like my family.” “I would say that some of these shots we had 80 versions of. And then when she stands up, Dani is thrown instantly into a bad trip.” “I’m going to go for a walk.” “And from here we kind of enter this negative vortex — “ “No, no, no, no. Don’t think that. You’re fine. It’s almost your birthday.” “ — where we start playing with facial warping, warping expressions. This effect was especially difficult to accomplish, and so a big part of my job and the job of my editorial team was actually to be merciless in the way we watched these effects as they came in — “They were laughing at me.” “ — to see if there were any effects in the background that jumped too suddenly or where the effect feels especially digital.” “You want to come meet my friends?” “Thank you, I’m — “ “The tripping effect for the background is more pronounced at the very end of the shot than anywhere else in the film. So the disorientation that the viewer might feel at this moment is more extreme than they will feel again.”

By Manohla Dargis

We horror-movie lovers are cheap dates. A creaking door and a shocking edit can be all it takes for us to yelp in surrender, as our sympathetic nervous systems kick in and we grab our seat arms or each other. Ari Aster, who made a splash last summer with his feature directing debut, “Hereditary,” understands the genre’s fundamentals. But his strength in that movie and his new one, “Midsommar,” is the setup, that part when he lays out his characters, their worlds and the menace that closes on them like a claw.

A cautionary tale about bad relationships and worse vacations, “Midsommar” gets its creep on early. When it opens, Dani (Florence Pugh), its deeply troubled axis, is having a lousy day that rapidly turns devastating . Her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), who’s on the verge of breaking up with her, isn’t much help, though he eventually comes through. Months later Dani is still having a rough time while Christian continues eyeing the closest exit. Their uneasy dynamic intensifies and changes during a catastrophic trip to a small, strange community in Sweden, where the expected summertime fun gives way to terror.

Aster handles the windup shrewdly with a persuasive realism, a deliberate pace and crepuscular lighting. Notably, he also sets Dani’s solitary tears and all of her feelings against the solidarity that Christian shares with his buds. The guys don’t make sense as friends, which scarcely matters at that point. Aster banks on the suspension of disbelief, which is part of the delicate compact we make with horror movies. When one bro, Mark (Will Poulter), starts running down Dani, you can almost see the expiration date on his forehead. As with much in this hyper-aware movie, Mark fits the role he was created to play by motor-mouthing his way into a narratively justified demise.

The stateside stuff drags (the movie runs two hours, 20 minutes) but when the story shifts to Sweden, everything changes, including the light. With his estimable crew — the cinematographer is Pawel Pogorzelski, the production designer is Henrik Svensson — Aster creates a sun-blasted, open-plan settlement that conveys airiness, back-to-the-land self-reliance and other assorted healthy things. There’s something odd about the smattering of buildings, which are too off-kilter to pass as charming; there are too few shadows and corners to hide in. The same goes for all the smiling white people in their pretty folk costumes. They’re so welcoming, yet so vacant.

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Midsommar Reviews

Midsommar is packed with reminders that if a film succeeds in depicting the darkness within vividly, then a sunshine-y environment can make the experience even more unnerving. Because viewers have nowhere to hide.

Full Review | Aug 27, 2024

In this immersive, subtle and unsettling horror master-work, Ari Aster takes his audience by the hand, and slowly and surely introduces the disturbing beneath the festive, relaxing and innocent.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 30, 2024

If you’re searching for a memorable breakup film—summer love rarely lasts—look no further than what Ari Aster offers here. Better yet, Midsommar would also make for quite a bonding experience when watched with a date…

Full Review | Jul 25, 2024

Sure, it has just as much to say about our ignorance toward other cultural rituals (using Swedish folklore), but as a horror film about a failing relationship, Midsommar kind of broke me.

Full Review | Jul 9, 2024

…’Get on with it’ would be a more appropriate title for Ari Aster’s glacially slow horror film, a follow up to Hereditary that repeats many of the same dread-inducing tropes but with a remarkable drop-off in terms of effect….

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 24, 2024

The performances from Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor are extraordinary, with both carrying two halves of Asters heart and reality.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Apr 4, 2024

As in his previous film, the familiar, spiritual and ritual outside the social canons of normativity will be present, as well as the horror genre fused with drama and mystery in that peculiar poetics that seems to characterize this autor.

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 27, 2024

Whether you love it or hate it, Midsommar is memorable. Florence Pugh carries the story on her shoulders with an astonishingly compelling performance, but her supporting cast didn't do much with their underdeveloped characters.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jul 24, 2023

What’s particularly remarkable is the feeling of dread that Aster is able to sustain over most of Midsommar’s two-hour-plus running time. This despite the fact that virtually the entire story unfolds under sunny skies.

Full Review | Jul 19, 2023

Midsommar is all steak, no sizzle, and no real lessons are learned other than, maybe, ‘Screw your mansplaining boyfriend.'

Full Review | Jun 5, 2023

Oh my god. What a movie. Unforgettable.

Full Review | Mar 31, 2023

I did not like MidSommar as much as I appreciated its audacity and the skill that clearly went into making it. This was a stunning work of art that embraced excess with a few positive results.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2022

Is it a movie about grief, emasculation, mental health, spiritual awakening? The movie seems to inadvertently ask “Who cares? Just watch another unnerving scene where the creepy Swedish cult does something else bizarre.”

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

Aster wields a two-pronged setup that pokes at feelings of anxiety about remote communities and their link to an untamed wilderness, while also presenting characters whose interpersonal drama underscores every potently disturbing situation in the film.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 2, 2022

Episode 42: Crawl / The Last Black Man in San Francisco / Chernobyl / Midsommar

Full Review | Original Score: 97/100 | Oct 4, 2021

One dizzying, hilarious trip into hell.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Aug 15, 2021

Midsommer is a tasty treat for horror fans.

Full Review | Jul 23, 2021

Ari Aster's Hereditary follow-up is a genuinely disturbing tale of nature-worshiping pagans.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 29, 2021

Bizarre is the main course in Midsommar, which serves as Florence Pugh's tour de force. A daylight horror movie that succeeds because of the efficiency of its first act. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Mar 1, 2021

It's difficult to imagine Midsommar satisfying true horror fans, but if you're interested in witnessing some ultra-strange cult rituals, it more than fits that bill.

Full Review | Feb 18, 2021

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‘midsommar’: film review.

'Hereditary' director Ari Aster sends unwitting Americans into a strange Swedish cult for his sophomore outing 'Midsommar.'

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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The horror equivalent of a destination wedding, Ari Aster’s Midsommar sends a troubled relationship and its most immediate witnesses to an exotic locale and asks if they have what it takes to survive. Things go as poorly for the pair as you’d guess, but not, perhaps, in quite the ways you’ll expect. A rangier if less frightening film than Aster’s debut Hereditary , it suggests the budding auteur’s honeymoon with highbrow-horror fans isn’t over: He has more sides he wants to show them, and he’s willing to risk embarrassment to explore his vision.

Like Hereditary , this story begins with an unusually fraught death in the family. But the film can hardly wait to leave this trauma behind, and to a large extent it loses its built-in emotional weight by thrusting its heroine into a completely different social dynamic and physical setting. Florence Pugh’s Dani becomes not so much a young woman grappling with devastating loss, but one whose boyfriend ( Jack Reynor ‘s Christian) can hardly tell the difference between manufactured neediness and the real thing.

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Spooky brain-bender Midsommar thrills with creepy Swedish communes and endless sunshine: EW review

You can’t be afraid of the dark in Midsommar , because darkness never comes. Everything that happens in writer-director Ari Aster’s cornea-searing, fantastically unnerving folk-horror reverie unfolds in the dazzling glare of June-bright sunlight — a waking nightmare nestled cozily within the clapboard barns and verdant valleys of the Swedish countryside (though actually, it was shot in Hungary).

Emotionally fragile Dani ( Outlaw King ’s Florence Pugh) is still lost in the fugue of a recent family tragedy when she gloms onto a guys’ trip her increasingly distant boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and several of his friends have planned: two pastoral weeks in the hometown of their fellow grad student, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren).

Though it’s not really a town at all, more a small communal settlement — and its beatific residents, with their Maypoles, muslin gowns, and flower crowns, seem to be toeing some hazy Scandinavian line between weekend at Coachella and Wicker Man . The group’s arcane rituals — the psychedelic teas and hand-carved runes, a lone bear in a cage that nobody offers to explain — seem charmingly quirky at first, and then more sinister.

Aster ( Hereditary ) is more a master stylist and moodsetter than a storyteller; even the plot’s most unsettling turns tend to come telegraphed with portent. Characters, too, lean toward archetype: the callow, self-absorbed boyfriend (Reynor); the earnest academic (William Jackson Harper); the boorish horndog (Will Poulter).

But his actors — especially the luminously expressive Pugh — are too good not to make the most of their roughly sketched roles. And like the fretful violins that stagger raggedly over the soundtrack, the skin-pricking pleasures of Midsommar aren’t rational, they’re instinctive: a thrilling, seasick freefall into the light. A–

Review: In the unsettling ‘Midsommar,’ the nightmare unfolds in broad daylight

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The setting of “Midsommar,” a luxuriant deep-tissue freakout from writer-director Ari Aster, is a picturesque commune in Hälsingland, Sweden, that is holding a nine-day celebration in observation of the summer solstice. Along for the trip is a young American, Dani (Florence Pugh), who has recently endured an unspeakable tragedy and seems doomed to endure another if the rules of genre and the playful, punishing sensibility of her creator are any indication.

It is no spoiler to note that the festivities begin in beauty and end in horror — and indeed, the picture’s most ingenious and intuitive stroke is to blur the boundaries between the two. Unlike Aster’s terrifying 2018 debut feature, “Hereditary,” a haunted-house tale bathed in nighttime shadows, “Midsommar” is a nightmare that unfolds in broad daylight. The spell that it casts is bright, dreamy and absorbing, but it is also in no particular hurry to come into focus, which makes its aftereffects all the harder to shake.

Aster’s admirers will recognize his shivery command of pace and tone here, as well as a few signature formal gestures: elegantly jarring transitions, eerie dream sequences, a camera that remains alert even when it stands at a remove from the action. “Midsommar” is as deliberate and drawn-out a picture as “Hereditary,” if also, ultimately, a less overtly frightening one. That may sound like a letdown, but it is also a sign of Aster’s growing confidence, his willingness to push his austere, slow-burning showmanship beyond the traditional grammar of cinematic horror.

RELATED: Disturbed and confused by ‘Midsommar’? Let the filmmakers explain »

What truly binds “Midsommar” to “Hereditary,” beyond their spasms of dark comedy and their fascination with intricate pagan subcultures, is a commitment to the subject of human grief. In each story the emotional and psychological contours of trauma, loss and abandonment are explored so ruthlessly that basic, bloodcurdling shocks seem almost a relief by comparison.

The story begins with Dani in a panic at home, as a personal emergency swiftly spirals toward its worst possible outcome. She seeks solace in the aftermath from her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), and is perhaps too shaken to realize that he was on the verge of ending their four-year relationship. That he feels obliged to stay with her, at least for now, is the only shred of decency Aster is willing to grant Christian, whose handsome face and reserved demeanor conceal a selfishness that can easily be mistaken for sensitivity. (His name, too, turns out to be no coincidence.)

Christian looks like optimal boyfriend material next to his unsympathetic grad-school buddies Josh (William Jackson Harper), who’s focused on writing his dissertation on ancient folklore, and Mark (Will Poulter), who seems to be pursuing a degree in advanced douchebaggery. The three of them have made plans to travel with a Swedish-born friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), to his ancestral village for a midsummer festival that occurs once every 90 years — a trippy European jaunt and an academic retreat rolled into one. Christian, feeling a sense of guilt and obligation to Dani, invites her along, to Mark and Josh’s barely concealed irritation.

If you think you can guess what’s coming next — various logistical nightmares, tetchy “bros before hos” arguments that erupt into screaming matches — you are in for the first of a few carefully doled-out surprises. In Pugh’s quietly astonishing performance, the sheer intensity of Dani’s grief, even when hidden behind a reassuring “I’m fine” smile, is palpable enough to keep the others on relatively good behavior. And the tense group dynamics are suspended, at least at first, by the weird splendor of the gathering that awaits them — a spectacle that cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski captures in a succession of breathtakingly composed and choreographed images.

The midnight sun bears down on a green landscape dotted with man-made structures — a pyramid-like yellow house, a Norse fertility symbol — that are at once charming and faintly sinister. Their hosts, known as the Hårga, wear flowers and white robes embroidered with mysterious symbols, and they go about their tasks with a ritualistic devotion that feels more serene than severe. All-natural hallucinogens are consumed, long silences are observed and only after a while is there any shedding of blood, in a moment whose terror is held in check — and also strangely intensified — by an unmistakable sense of awe.

The Hårga welcome their American visitors with more politeness than warmth, allowing them to join in their celebrations but offering little warning about what each new day will bring. Their customs and artifacts are of great scholarly interest to Josh and Christian, and Aster and his production designer, Henrik Svensson, approach this fictional cult with their own anthropological obsessiveness. The visual scheme isn’t big on explanations — what’s with the bear in the cage? — but as you study the exquisite runes and paintings, the lavish feasts and maypole dances, some of them set to Bobby Krlic’s ecstatically dissonant score, you feel swept up into a world that exists outside time.

The sunlight, disorienting and ever-present, could be a metaphor for Dani’s grief, which would be unyielding even if Christian were genuinely interested in consoling her. But in a more literal and provocative sense it suggests a kind of illumination, a new way of seeing.

Dani is a creature of the modern world who suddenly finds herself lost in a pagan, pre-technological one, an unsettling change of scenery that is also, in some ways, an improvement. Life here is predicated on selflessness, and individual woes seem happily nonexistent. Sex and death, sources of so much pain and anxiety elsewhere, are here tamed into collective submission.

This stands in stark contrast to Mark’s testosterone-fueled idiocy and a peevish academic rivalry that develops between Christian and Josh, all of which amount to a withering assessment of contemporary American masculinity. These are in some ways the least interesting aspects of “Midsommar,” partly because they feel like plot triggers from a more conventional horror movie. (One point that bears closer scrutiny: Josh is pointedly one of three people of color in the story, and his willful immersion in this land of white robes and faces at times brings to mind a rural Scandinavian version of “Get Out.”) Think of these beats as easily digestible bread crumbs on the narrative trail, forging a path into the darker, more difficult heart of the material.

Aster has said that he wrote “Midsommar” years ago following a very bad breakup — an impishly sincere admission that reminded me of the Danish auteur Lars von Trier, who has credited some of his wilder movies to his own epic bouts of depression. There is a whiff of Von Trier’s “Antichrist” to this movie’s gender politics, and there are also strong echoes of Alex Garland’s “Annihilation,” Ben Wheatley’s “Kill List” and especially Robin Hardy’s 1973 pagan-cult classic, “The Wicker Man.” The weight of all this self-conscious auteurism undoubtedly hangs over “Midsommar,” but crucially, it doesn’t leach the movie of its feverish intensity or its strange, searching emotional power.

Amid scenes of revelry, ritual sacrifice and very bizarre sex, what you remember most is the extraordinary commingling of terror and exultation in Dani’s eyes as she beholds the fate that awaits her and her companions. Aster’s control is startling: With diabolical suggestiveness he keeps widening the chasm between Dani and Christian, placing visual and emotional space between two people whose souls have long since drifted apart.

These spaces stretch toward eternity in “Midsommar,” and they speak powerfully to how distant we all are, how little we truly know about each other’s intimate experience — and how, in the end, the not knowing may be for the best.

------------

‘Midsommar’

Rated: R, for disturbing ritualistic violence and grisly images, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language

Running time: 2 hours, 26 minutes

Playing: Opens July 3 in general release

[email protected] | Twitter: @JustinCChang

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“Midsommar,” Reviewed: Ari Aster’s Backward Horror Story of an American Couple in Sweden

Ari Aster is a writer and director of cult movies—his two features, “ Hereditary ,” from 2018, and “Midsommar,” which opened last week, are both grotesque and gory dramas about cults. “Hereditary” showed a family’s destruction by an ancient curse, which turned a young suburban man into a mystical cult’s unwilling king. “Midsommar” is the story of a group of American graduate students who are invited, or lured, by a Swedish friend to a remote summer festival, which turns out to involve a series of ritual murders. Both films are built backwards—their elaborate setups are designed to generate particular images of horror. Their psychology is flimsy, their characters undeveloped beyond a small set of traits that lead, inevitably, to the films’ results. Aster lines up details that don’t merely invite reconciliation but provide virtually the entire dramatic experience. There’s a political tinge to those details, which presents an illusion of substance and a veneer of social conscience. In “Hereditary,” it’s a literal perpetuation of patriarchy; in “Midsommar,” it’s the fecklessness of a shitty boyfriend. But, in both movies, the imagery that gives them their emotional impact takes precedence over any dramatic considerations. In “Hereditary,” the less-ambitious film, the results are merely ludicrous; in the grander and more visionary “Midsommar,” they’re regressive, the product of a filmmaker who’s so busy looking at his images that he doesn’t see what he’s doing.

“Midsommar” begins with a tragedy. The protagonist, Dani (Florence Pugh), a psychology student, discovers a terrifying e-mail from her sister, Terri (Klaudia Csányi), who is bipolar. Home alone, Dani seeks the consolation of her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), a graduate student in anthropology, who’s hanging out with his male friends. After he grudgingly agrees to see her that night, Dani learns that Terri has killed her parents and herself. Several months later, Christian is preparing to take a trip to Sweden in the company of his fellow anthropology students, the earnest Josh (William Jackson Harper) and the frivolous Mark (Will Poulter), at the invitation of yet another classmate, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). It’s supposed to be a guys’ trip, spiced with the fantasy of Swedish women awaiting them, and Christian has been keeping it a secret until soon before the departure date. Nonetheless, he again grudgingly invites the grieving Dani to come along, and, to his and his friends’ dismay, she accepts.

The exposition, setting up the premise for the trip, is both lugubriously long and trivializingly brief. The entire drama depends upon the relationship between Dani and Christian, but, in lieu of developing it, Aster drops details onscreen like index cards. Dani wonders, on the phone to a friend, whether she has been burdening Christian with her troubles. In a bar, Christian’s friends echo back at him that Dani is depending on him and “doesn’t like sex.” But little of their relationship is actually shown. Aster reduces the film’s central dynamic to something even less thoughtful than stereotype or cliché—he renders it as assumptions, as offscreen events that suffice to be filled in by viewers. He does the same with Terri’s agonies and Dani’s grief; he uses the theme of mental illness and constructs the thin and bare texture of Dani’s life not to consider her experience but to enable his plot. Orphaned and seemingly completely isolated, with no friends or other relatives, Dani is both tethered solely to Christian and vulnerable to the wiles of a surrogate family, however malevolent.

By the time the group gets to Sweden, the movie, only a few minutes old, is virtually over: it’s built on such a void of insight and experience, such a void of character and relationships, that even the first level of the house of narrative cards can’t stand. Not long after they arrive at the isolated grounds of the festival, it becomes clear to them that they’ve been lured into a sort of cult. The residents wear floral white robes and practice traditional arts and crafts, and they welcome their visitors with a cheerful round of hallucinogenic mushrooms. But the rigid order of their society quickly appears coercive and soon turns deadly, with the enforced ritual suicide of two elderly people. As the action proceeds, the film devolves into a sort of pseudo-anthropological version of “And Then There Were None,” as the visitors become, successively, victims of ever more horrific, ritually mandated killings.

The scheme of “Midsommar” revolves around its characters’ field of study, anthropology: the organization of society, the nature of culture. One of the crucial pretexts for the graduate students’ trip to the festival is that Josh is writing his thesis on summer-festival rituals across cultures and hopes to include this one in his research. What’s more, after his first experiences at the festival, Christian, who’s floundering in his field and unsure about his thesis topic, decides to make it his subject of study, as well, creating a rift between the two friends that further isolates both and renders them ever more vulnerable to the cult’s clutches. The trip’s anthropological basis, and the theoretical premise enfolding the elaborately imagined festival, suggests an admirably bold ambition on the part of Aster—a severe test of artistry akin to the grand design of Jordan Peele, who, in his second feature, “ Us ,” embraced a similarly vast view of social order symbolically, and that of Jim Jarmusch in his political zombie movie “ The Dead Don’t Die .”

Yet the world-building of “Midsommar” remains at the level of information-dosing; Aster doesn’t imagine the story in relation to modern experience—there isn’t even the power of Google, with which his characters could put the rustic retreat of horror into context (or wonder at the lack of it). By binding his characters to the needs of the plot, Aster reduces the film’s grand purview to a petty grumble and, in the process, he uses the anthropological framework—likely unintentionally—as the basis for a smug and narrow-minded pathologizing of social science. After the suicides of the elderly people, the only other two visitors, Connie (Ellora Torchia) and Simon (Archie Madekwe), horrified, decide to leave the compound at once, and are, supposedly, being taken to the nearest train station by a member of the group—separately. That separation, obviously suspicious, is justified by one resident on the grounds that the only available truck is a two-seater, and one couldn’t sit on the other’s lap because, he says, “We don’t break traffic laws.”

That’s the best single line reading, the only truly memorable moment of performance, in the entire movie. It’s also the movie’s most meaningful, and grimmest, joke. Rulebound but lawless, living nominally in Sweden but utterly cut off from the supervision and regulation of Swedish law, the cult is the very essence of autonomy, of a freely chosen social organization that’s subject to no other civil authority—and that, at the same time, asserts its own sense of righteousness on the grounds of ancient and transcendent authority. In this sense, the subject of “Midsommar” is the absurdity and obtuseness of suspending moral judgment for other cultures in the name of curiosity, respect, or relativism.

In the course of the film, Dani sees the depths of betrayal to which Christian is willing to descend. (Is he groomed, drugged, desperate to ingratiate himself with his hosts, who are now also his thesis benefactors, merely monstrous, or some combination thereof? The movie doesn’t say; for all the time that the couple spends together, Aster doesn’t pause or detour to hear their thoughts.) Dani ultimately gets a measure of revenge—though even this, in Aster’s archly plotted script construction, offers Dani some mixed motives of her own, a measure of mercy along with her rage. It isn’t only anthropology that comes in for derision; Dani’s studies in psychology, too, are rendered ludicrous as much by the cult’s perverse cruelty as by her own unexplored and vague relationship to all of her experiences.

On the other hand, Aster is big on décor and costume. The architectural idiosyncrasy of the buildings on the vast property; the intricate wallpaper; the elaborate mural that shows, briefly but unambiguously, a woman cutting her own genitals; the floral arrangements and table settings; the sheafs and tarps laid out for hundreds of feet along the breadth and length of a pathway; the meticulous preparation of victims and laying out of corpses; even a few noteworthy special effects that conjure hallucinogenic states with wavery motions—all suggest a greater attention to eye-catching detail than to the lives or thoughts of the characters. Aster is after effects, not causes; doctrines, not ideas. Certain images of mutilated bodies, of violence, of gore, fulfill the basic requirements of the genre—they shock, they stir fear and revulsion, and they add an element of moral horror, the implications of which seem to have eluded Aster’s decorative gaze. Under the rhetoric of pleasure, freedom, and the warmth of a virtual extended family, Aster finds bloody totalitarian mind control. In the name of ethnographic interest, he finds complicity in evil. From the spirit of adventure and curiosity, he finds horror. In the end, the subject of “Midsommar” is as simple as it is regressive: lucky Americans, stay home.

“The Dead Don’t Die,” Reviewed: Jim Jarmusch’s Fiercely Political Zombie Comedy

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Midsommar review: One of the year’s strangest, most distressing, and most memorable films

Director ari aster’s follow-up to last year’s hereditary proves he’s far from a one-hit wonder, article bookmarked.

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Dir: Ari Aster. Starring: Florence Pugh, Will Poulter, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Liv Mjones, and Julia Ragnarsson. 18, 147 mins

For director Ari Aster , horror starts at home. It’s those closest to us that can inflict the deepest wounds. In his debut film Hereditary , released last year to both great acclaim and some healthy dissent, he dealt with the terrors of the family unit, where guilt and resentment have as powerful a sway as love. Yet he did so with the help of all things macabre – witches, ghosts, and demons – and crafted tableaux straight out of a waking nightmare. His follow-up, Midsommar , serves up much of the same: it’s a break-up movie wrapped up in pagan horror. It’s also bound to be one of this year’s most memorable films, proving that Aster is far from a one-hit wonder.

At its centre is Dani (Florence Pugh), a young American woman who’s suffered unspeakable loss but isn’t getting the support she needs from her boyfriend of four years, Christian (Jack Reynor). He’s an emotional brick wall, which isn’t helped by the fact his friends have always encouraged him in his neglectfulness, at one point declaring her frequent phone calls to be “literally abuse”. They do, at the very least, offer her a pity invite to their boys’ trip to northern Sweden, where they plan to visit the hometown of Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) and take part in its ancestral midsommar celebration – an event that takes place there every 90 years. Each of the men are drawn there for different reasons: Christian and Josh (William Jackson Harper) are both anthropologists with an interest in the local traditions, while Mark (Will Poulter) is only there for the ladies. Pelle, at first, seems just a little homesick, although he’s suspiciously eager to have Dani tag along.

The people of his isolated community, known as the Harga, seem friendly enough, though a little unusual. Everything they do seems bound by ritual, whether it’s the way they eat, do their laundry, or flirt with their new visitors. Unsurprisingly, this veneer of geniality eventually starts to crack, as their customs become increasingly barbaric with each passing day. The violence is brutal, the deaths are gruesome, and their cruelty is unsurpassed. The orgies are a bit awkward, too. Yet, Midsommar , at the end of the day, isn’t here just to crank scares out of creepy European traditions. It’s about what happens when you drop a fragile relationship into the most extreme of circumstances, in a place where everything is driven by a cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

Dani and Christian’s reactions to this unfolding horror tell us everything we need to know about them. In a startling performance from Pugh, we see her mouth start to sink into a downturned grimace, as she collapses on to the floor under the weight of her own anguish, wailing like an animal. Reynor, who’s also excellent, reacts to everything like a deer in headlights. His way to cope is to straight out refuse to process anything that’s happening to him. It’s the fundamental differences between two people, supposedly committed to each other, that ends up being the scariest thing of all.

As he did in Hereditary , Aster puts much of his emphasis on singular, shocking images. He lets the camera creep closer and closer until we become consumed by what see before us. Sometimes we’re watching the action unfold in the reflection of a mirror, like we’re watching our own selves. But we’re also constantly tripped up by a false sense of tranquillity. The film, which stretches to nearly two and a half hours, is in absolutely no rush to reach its horrifying conclusion. That might leave some impatiently looking at their watches, wondering when the heads will finally start to roll, but it also allows you to feel at home with the characters’ own uncertainty about the situation. The Harga treat every act – whether horrifying or not – as just an ordinary part of their lives, which makes Christian and his friends initially unwilling to turn tail and run, since they’re so concerned about seeming disrespectful to their welcoming hosts. The sun barely sets during the summer in northern Sweden, meaning the vast majority of scenes take place in bright daylight. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski surrounds us in the superficial comforts of blue skies, fertile greenery, and the crisp white tunics of the Harga. Henrik Svensson’s production design equally avoids the overtly sinister, with the commune’s wooden buildings lovingly hand-painted with simple patterns and scenes of old, folksy practices. It’s only when you look closer that you realise these images are actually a warning of what lies ahead.

None of this sounds like the usual way to approach horror, but Aster’s MO is to throw convention out of the window. Again, much like his previous film (specifically, Toni Collette’s explosive breakdown at the dinner table), there are traces of morbid humour, but these are tense, uncomfortable laughs – the kind that unintentionally burst out when we’re faced with the incomprehensible. When I found myself sniggering at bloody mayhem, I really did feel like a part of this slow descent into madness. Midsommar might seem like an easy sell (people in flower crowns being creepy! Wicker Man vibes!), but it’s far from an easy movie. It’s strange and distressing at times, even a little punishing to audiences, but it’s filled with ideas, images, and feelings that will stay with you long after the credits roll. And it’s worth every second.

Midsommar is released in UK cinemas on 5 July

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Ari Aster’s Midsommar Is an Ambitious, Blurry Horror Trip

This review was originally published last month. We are republishing the piece as the film hits theaters this weekend.

In the climax of writer-director Ari Aster ’s supremely un-fun debut, Hereditary , a character saws off her own head in what might be the all-time grisliest metaphor for surrendering to groupthink. Aster’s equally grueling new movie, Midsommar , offers a sunnier alternative to sawing off one’s own head: sawing off someone else’s — or incinerating them, or removing their innards and stuffing their bodies with branches, fruit, flowers, etc. The theme, however, is the same: The allure of an alternate family with clear-cut (if murderous) values. Instead of a coven of dour witches, it’s now a cult of radiant pagan Swedes who believe themselves in harmony with the natural world, along with a bereft American protagonist, Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh), who finds herself slowly coming into harmony with them: Hey, maybe these crazy pagans are onto something . Instead of darkness, Aster gives us light — blondes in white frocks in the midsummer Swedish solstice. Midsommar might be the whitest horror movie ever made.

The most ambitious horror blurs the line between the psychological and the mythic, between ordinary human emotions and symbol-laden Blakean nightmares, and Aster is very ambitious and very blurry. Midsommar opens with an inconsolably hideous tragedy involving Dani’s bipolar sister and parents, but as she howls with grief, her boyfriend of four years, Christian (Jack Reynor), is emotionally miles away. His buddies, Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter), think Dani’s a drag on his ambitions and invite him to the rural home of their Swedish buddy, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), where Josh plans to do research for his Ph.D. thesis on ancient European midsummer rites and Mark plans to have sex with Swedish girls. Christian half-heartedly invites Dani, hoping that she’ll say no. But Dani, having lost her family, doesn’t have much else in her life.

As Dani, Pugh is amazingly vivid. Her face is so wide and open that she seems to have nowhere to hide her emotions. Everything about her is insistent. Her intensity reminds me of Lili Taylor’s, but her voice is throatier, and she bends Midsommar toward her. She’s uncannily in sync with the score by Bobby Krlic (who records under the moniker the Haxan Cloak) — harsh and unmoored before Dani arrives in Sweden, more attuned when Dani stumbles into that Swedish landscape with its soft green hills and simple geometric buildings. (The film was actually shot in Hungary.) Aster and the production designer, Henrik Svensson, have designed the “Hårga” village from scratch. It’s like a child’s rendering of a happy, bucolic place, a mixture of circles, squares, and triangles that’s so elemental it’s otherworldly.

Aster paces Midsommar more like an opera (Wagner, not Puccini) than a scare picture, and for a while I thought he’d get away with his longueurs. The characters are fed hallucinogens and he must want you to feel as if you’ve been fed them, too, so that the pagan hymns cross the blood-brain barrier and the villagers — smiling but oddly formal, and so damn white — make you giggle and shudder simultaneously. The problem is that apart from the extremeness of the gore and a quasi-orgy (two naked people having sex in front of a naked female choir) that will make at least half the audience whoop for all the wrong reasons, the movie has no surprises. From the start, runic murals and paintings have signaled the characters’ fates. The names are symbolic: Dani Ardor is a woman denied love. Christian, like Christianity itself, has become less empathetic in the modern age, more identified with self-gratification. Screw Christian(ity): It’s paganism that offers true family values to the woman who has been robbed of a sense of connection. As Dani is gradually stirred by the Hårga, there’s nothing much to do but watch the non-Swedish characters get mauled or disappear outright and wait for the crowning of the “May Queen” that’s a foregone conclusion.

After the first press screening, Aster spoke of being approached by Swedish financiers to direct a sort of Wicker Man –like hack-‘em-up and rejecting the idea. He thought he had no way into the story until he had a messy breakup and decided he’d take the Swedish money and make the ugliest end-of-a-relationship movie ever. Perhaps Midsommar doesn’t jell because its impulses are so bifurcated. It’s a parable of a woman’s religious awakening — that’s also a woman’s fantasy of revenge against a man who didn’t meet her emotional needs — that’s also a male director’s masochistic fantasy of emasculation at the hands of a matriarchal cult. Aster seems sure of only one thing: that he wants to make you feel as if your head is being sawed off.

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Common Sense Says
Parents Say 75 Reviews
Kids Say 145 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Unsettling, high-class horror movie is extremely violent.

Parents Need to Know

Why Age 17+?

Gory, grisly violence; some involves potentially disturbing rituals. Characters

Both men and women shown naked -- full-frontal nudity. Characters have sex while

Many uses of "f--k" or "f---ing." Also "s--t," "bulls--t," "bitch," "hell," "d--

Characters eat "magic mushrooms" and get high (trees ripple back and forth and a

Any Positive Content?

Asks subtle questions about how devoted we are to others vs. our own needs; coul

No real role models here. Most characters, while human and flawed, show that the

Violence & Scariness

Gory, grisly violence; some involves potentially disturbing rituals. Characters jump from high cliff and splatter on ground. Character's face bashed in with wooden mallet. Gory, smashed faces shown. A character dies via suicide (by running a tube from a car's exhaust pipe to her mouth). Body found hanging from rafters, torso torn open, lungs ripped out. Character knocked out with blunt object and dragged away, leaving blood trail. Deaths; several bodies are burned, including some burned alive. People scoop intestines out of dead bear. Drawing of a woman bleeding from her vagina into a cup. Scary nightmare scene. Ritual cutting of hands, with blood. Arguing, screaming, vomiting.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Both men and women shown naked -- full-frontal nudity. Characters have sex while others chant nearby, emulating moaning noises. Kissing. Drawing of a woman cutting her pubic hair. Close-up drawing of a vagina. Pubic hair found in food. Men gaze at women. Some sex-related talk. Brief discussions of incest/inbreeding.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Many uses of "f--k" or "f---ing." Also "s--t," "bulls--t," "bitch," "hell," "d--k," "piss," "jerk off," "sucks," "oh my God," "Jesus Christ."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Characters eat "magic mushrooms" and get high (trees ripple back and forth and appear to be breathing). Characters are given other kinds of drugs or hallucinogens during ceremonies. Character takes prescription Ativan tablet for anxiety. Beers at party, social drinking. Characters smoke e-cigarettes, cigarettes, and a pipe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Asks subtle questions about how devoted we are to others vs. our own needs; could a truly supportive network, despite its flaws, be better than not connecting at all?

Positive Role Models

No real role models here. Most characters, while human and flawed, show that they're capable of doing iffy to downright despicable things.

Parents need to know that Midsommar is an extremely violent horror movie from the maker of Hereditary . It involves a sinister, ages-old ceremony that includes disturbing rituals. Characters are beaten and smashed, and bodies are cut up and burned (in some cases, alive). A character dies via suicide, bodies splatter on the ground, gory/smashed faces are shown, a body is found hanging from the rafters with the torso torn open, a dead bear is cut open, and more. There's also a nightmare sequence, vomiting, and general screaming and arguing. There's both male and female full-frontal nudity, as well as a fairly graphic sex scene and kissing. A close-up drawing of a vagina is shown as part of a "love" ritual. Language includes several uses of "f--k," plus "s--t," "oh my God," and more. Characters take hallucinogenic mushrooms and are given several other kinds of mysterious drugs; some use e-cigarettes and smoke cigarettes and a pipe. Beers are shown at a party. This is a first-class entry in the horror genre, but it's very mature and isn't for young viewers. Note: This review is for the R-rated version of the film; an unrated director's cut is also available and may include additional content not covered here. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parent and Kid Reviews

Parents say (75)
Kids say (145)

Based on 75 parent reviews

Very disturbing. This will stay with you.

This film is ruthlessly and atrociously disturbing, graphic and at times sexually explicit, what's the story.

In MIDSOMMAR, Dani ( Florence Pugh ) suffers a terrible blow when she loses her sister and her parents in one tragic night. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Christian ( Jack Reynor ), has been wanting to break up with her -- but now he doesn't have the heart. So he invites her to come along on a trip to Sweden that he's planned with his friends Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark ( Will Poulter ); their other friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), has invited them to a special festival that's held only once every 90 years. The festival seems enchanting -- until a strange ritual shocks the Americans. Then people start disappearing, and strange potions are served. As the festival heads toward its final day, Dani finds her fate entwined with the disturbing festivities.

Is It Any Good?

Set in broad daylight, during the time of Northern Europe's midnight sun, this horror movie isn't about getting the creeps so much as it is about the slow, methodical unmasking of horrors most human. With Midsommar , writer/director Ari Aster ( Hereditary ) proves himself an upper-crust genre filmmaker, like Jordan Peele ( Get Out , Us ) and Robert Eggers ( The Witch , The Lighthouse ). He goes beyond jump scares, hauntings, and moody atmospheres into something deeper and longer-reaching. The movie, which echoes The Wicker Man but travels in its own direction, is complex enough to consider that the ages-old Swedish rituals may actually have their own kind of logic, which might be superior to the self-serving, entitled attitudes of the Western visitors.

Yet Aster is smart enough and tricky enough that he lures viewers through Midsommar 's 140 minutes with effortless grace; his characters are flawed, but they're human, and they have traits that make them endearing. Their trials and thought processes have intrinsic logic, yet the locals -- clad in their white, flower-edged gowns and crowns of leaves -- are also unfailingly logical. Aster matches logic with movement as he establishes his large, haunted space and moves through it as if deep in thought. (Some of the movie's huge, deliberate movements feel like the Stanley Kubrick of The Shining .) There's no place to hide here, no place to be alone. It would follow, then, that there's no place to be caught off guard. But such an idea is deceptive. In the end, like the best monster movies, Midsommar shows that monsters lurk within all of us.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Midsommar 's violence . Do you think all of it is necessary to tell the story? What effect does it have? Shocking? Thrilling? Do you think that was the intent?

How does the movie depict sex ? What values are imparted? How do they compare to your own?

How are drugs depicted? Is taking drugs glamorized ? Does the movie make you want to try them?

Is the movie scary ? What's the appeal of horror movies?

The movie seems to be talking about the value of family and community vs. being entitled and/or self-serving. Do you think it's trying to convey a specific message?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 3, 2019
On DVD or streaming : October 8, 2019
Cast : Florence Pugh , Will Poulter , Jack Reynor
Director : Ari Aster
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : A24
Genre : Horror
Run time : 140 minutes
MPAA rating : R
MPAA explanation : disturbing ritualistic violence and grisly images, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language
Last updated : May 23, 2024

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Midsommar is a brutish, nasty daylight nightmare from the director of Hereditary

It will haunt you.

by Alissa Wilkinson

Have you ever been in a place very far north or south during the months when the sun barely sets? Unless you’ve already grown used to it, it’s both beautiful and frightening. In the unending daylight, brains accustomed to resetting themselves when it gets dark start to fuzz out confusedly; basic concepts on which our bodies depend, like time, no longer make a fundamental, corporeal sense. It’s disorienting and eerie, lending an otherworldly quality to everything. The last time I was in Iceland, in early July several years ago, I understood why talk of the existence of fairies and gnomes persists there.

Ari Aster’s Midsommar, a confidently directed and operatic follow-up to 2018’s Hereditary , situates its tale of grief, breakups, and rites in northern Sweden, at the height of its endless sun season. It’s a smart choice for the story he wants to tell. Midsommar is obsessed with the passage of time and the cycle of seasons, and the ways humans scramble to make sense of life’s big changes (like death, aging, and breakups).

As it turns out, neither the modern approach of treating changes like tragedies to be mourned nor the more ancient, even pagan instinct to memorialize them with rituals and acceptance is more “civilized.” Human life is violent, nasty, and explosive.

This is, after all, a horror film. It’s meant to horrify us. And there’s nothing on earth more horrifying than existence itself.

Horror challenges our beliefs that the world can be controlled, and Midsommar knows just how to do it

Note: This should go without saying, but if you don’t want any spoilers at all about the plot of Midsommar , stop here and come back after you’ve seen the film.

Horror burrows under our skin because it clobbers one of the core principles we Modern People cling to: The world may be confusing, but it is ultimately knowable. Through study and medicine and technology, we can control everything from our emotions to the weather.

Of course, this is a ridiculous fiction, but we hold on to it to get through the day. Even religious people, who look beyond the strictly material to make sense of the world, still tend to believe in scientific explanations for why rain falls, or why some combination of ingredients, pressed into a pill, can help you feel better.

So the truly inexplicable unnerves us, and perhaps nothing is more inexplicable than death — why it happens and whether it has meaning or simply proves that nothing really matters in the end. We don’t understand it. We never have.

That’s what Aster seems to inherently understand: His films spend lots of time developing a sense of dread about and horror of the ordinary before they spiral off into the extraordinary. Life and its disintegrations are scary enough.

Hereditary was about a family (and especially a woman) in deep mourning after the ordinary death of one family member and the tragic death of another. In the end, the film dipped into the terrifyingly supernatural.

In Midsommar , another woman, a graduate student named Dani (Florence Pugh), is grieving her entire family after her sister, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, kills herself and her parents by piping car exhaust into the sealed-off house at night. Mental health issues seem to runs in the family — another strong link to Hereditary , which can be read as an allegory for inherited mental illness — but an event like this would take down the most stable and even-keeled person. Dani takes a break from school, but holds it together with the help of her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor). (More on that name later.)

The thing is, Christian was about to break up with Dani just before the tragedy, with encouragement from his fellow dirtbag grad school friends Josh (William Jackson Harper), Mark (Will Poulter), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren). But now, of course, he can’t.

Months later, when summer arrives, Dani and Christian are still listlessly together. Josh is writing his dissertation on traditional midsummer celebrations, and Pelle is from a remote village in northern Sweden, so when Josh decides to accompany Pelle home for a month and a half to do more research, Mark and Christian decide to tag along. And after a near-fight with Dani, Christian invites her too — apparently to avoid an actual fight — and to everyone’s surprise, she decides to come.

Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, and Will Poulter in Midsommar.

Pelle’s village is more like a commune, or “a community,” as Pelle puts it — essentially a cluster of four buildings nestled into a hidden valley. To get there, the group drives four hours from Stockholm, hikes through the woods, and finally emerges into the clearing through a wooden gate that resembles a sunburst. Everyone in the community is tall and blond and Swedish, and for their annual “midsommar” celebrations, they’ve dressed in white, braided flower crowns, and prepared for nine days of rituals.

Everything in the community seems at once odd and kind of idyllic. It’s all very harmonious. The quartet of Americans start to learn the ways of the group, who split life into 18-year seasons: spring (until age 18), summer (ages 18 to 36), fall (36 to 54), and winter (54 to 72). Your work, activities, stature in the community, and even sleeping arrangements are dictated by your season. They’ve developed a way of life that, through its rituals, ascribes a sacredness to every part of life, from birth to death — basically, the kind of religion less interested in deities than in worshipping the cycle of life itself.

But the harmony, of course, masks something much darker. And the four American interlopers slowly discover that they’re being drawn into it, which they very much cannot control.

Midsommar suggests existence is terrible, no matter how you handle it

Midsommar brings together some truly excellent acting talent, and that — along with the simultaneously gorgeous and creepy images Aster concocts with cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski — is reason enough to see it. Reynor (whose most winning role is as the older brother in Sing Street ), Poulter (from Black Mirror: Bandersnatch ), and Harper (playing a version of his Good Place character Chidi) are all great counterweights to the ethereal villagers.

Each ably represents some kind of dully modern tendency. Josh is the pedantic ethnographer who turns the village’s magic into an object for study; Mark won’t stop vaping and making lewd comments about the women; and the conflict-avoiding Christian — whose very name seems chosen to indicate he’s the avatar of a post-pagan era — seems incapable of making choices for himself, or of imagining himself in anyone else’s shoes.

But the most stunning performance comes from Pugh, who ignited 2017’s Lady Macbeth with her chilling portrayal of a wronged woman exacting her revenge on the world of men. (She’ll soon be playing Amy March in Greta Gerwig’s Little Women , due out this fall.) In Midsommar , she unloads her guts in paroxysms of grief so primal and violent, they nearly upstage the film’s scariest images.

And scary images it has in abundance. After its initial tragedy, Midsommar spends so much time letting us dwell in the sunlit paradise of the village that we’ve almost forgotten we’re watching a horror film by the time the first jolt arrives. When it does, though, the movie won’t let us forget again. There’s no cutting away from the disturbing in Midsommar (in fact, the camera prefers to push into the worst of it); you will look at this, and you will see the violence that is life and death, the movie says.

Yet it’s the clash of the pagan rituals and the outsiders’ attempts to deal with them that’s scariest. Some try to analyze, or to run away; others, in the end, just give up. Yet Midsommar is not really pro-pagan. Is life in a world where death is accepted, welcomed, even ritualized better than in our own, where it is nasty and brutish and unnaturally extended?

Yes, the movie says, but also no. If anything, the perspective of Midsommar is almost anti-humanist: People find ways to make the crude facts of life, the violence of acts of birth, reproduction, and death, seem less awful. But whether we celebrate the seasons of life or fight them, welcome the changes or mourn them, it’s still bad.

There’s no escaping the brutality of existence, no dark corner to hide in. The best you can do is look it straight in the eye and smile through the savagery.

Midsommar opens in theaters on July 3.

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‘Midsommar’ Review: Pagan Horror Gets a New Classic

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Ari Aster is a bold new voice in psychological horror, the kind that messes ruthlessly with your head. He proved that last year with Hereditary, featuring Toni Colette in one of cinema’s most memorable meltdowns. And now, with the hypnotic and haunting Midsommar, he ventures into fresh territory without losing his grasp of what nightmares are made of.

Aster wittily calls his follow-up a “breakup movie.” He came up with the script while going through his own parting of the ways. That’s as personal as this filmmaker gets in interviews. On screen, he cuts right to the tortured core of mental anguish. Rated R for “disturbing ritualistic violence and grisly images, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language,” Midsommar has all those things and more. But the R should also stand for raw and riveting. It’s also potently, profanely funny in in the most warped of ways.

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Aster takes an unrushed two-and-a-half hours to tell his tale and the slow-build may test the patience of audiences panting for a shot of cinematic adrenaline. But when he sinks his hooks in, there’s no wiggling off. Pawel Pogorzelski’s expert cinematography drenches the film in sinister atmospherics with the evocative and eerie score by Bobby Krlic drawing us in almost against our will. Take special note of Henrik Svensson’s production design which does a much as the script, perhaps more, to pin us to our seats.

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Things do get bloody and head-bashingly visceral when a few Swedish seniors come up with brutal methods to avoid aging. And Christian — a provocative name for a protagonist in a movie about pagan ritual — is hit on hard by a local beauty. One sequence, in which naked female cultists of all ages and body sizes have a go at stirring Christian’s bodily fluids, is a carnal hellzapoppin’.

And, oh, about that breakup story. Dani is not one to stand idly by, especially when she dances herself into a frenzy to win the title of May Queen. Pugh — the breakout star of Lady Macbeth and soon to be seen in Greta Gerwig’s upcoming take on Little Women — works wonders in showing us a character who grows in confidence and toxic strength as the film progresses toward Dani’s validating vengeance. Aster doesn’t do much to illuminate the internal lives of his characters the way he did in Hereditary — except for Dani with whom he clearly identifies. Near the end, Pugh offers a smile as enigmatic as any the Mona Lisa could muster. And Midsommar, which simmers with dread, asserts itself as an unnerving spellbinder that dodges the usual terror tropes to plumb the violence of the mind.

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Midsommar (2019)

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Midsommar Review

05 Jul 2019

To anyone who might be worried that, following the neck-slicing, demon-summoning terrors of Hereditary , Ari Aster has gone Hollywood: fear not. Or rather: fear. Because instead he’s gone Hälsingland. For his second feature film, the writer-director has conjured up an even madder and more ambitious nightmare, set in the remote wilds of northern Sweden and featuring ingredients not usually found in scary movies. The skies are blue. The sun is out. And everywhere are angelic-looking characters, adorned with flowers and dancing merrily. It’s the polar opposite of that bleak, cramped house in Hereditary , yet Aster makes the experience every bit as unsettling, orchestrating the descent from paradise to, well, something else with clinical precision. It’s a virtuoso, bone-shaking, head-spinning experience. The vibe is hard to shake off. And you might not be ordering from Interflora again for a while.

The set-up is vaguely Hostel -y: after an intense prologue in which an awful tragedy befalls the family of Dani (Pugh), she, her boyfriend Christian (Reynor) and his grad-school buddies decide to head to Sweden for a backpacking break. Dani and Christian appear to be on the rocks: she’s afraid she’s leaning too much on him, while his friends urge him to ditch her and play the field. It’s relationship drama played out with operatic intensity, and with bold Asterian licks, like an unflinchingly long shot of Dani on the phone, making clear her mental state, or a slow zoom through a dark window that feels like a plunge into an abyss.

Makes the famous ending of The Wicker Man look like a documentary on the Fyre Festival.

Then we get to Sweden. The film is in no rush to introduce us to the ways of the Harga, the peculiar, ever-smiling tribe who have taken over an idyllic meadow surrounded by forest. There’s a pause for a magic-mushrooms trip, and for Christian’s sleazy pal Mark (Will Poulter) to leer at Nordic women. When they do arrive at the village, we are immediately immersed in ancient rituals that aren’t explained, activities that may or may not be ominous playing out in the background of frames. Aster and his set decorator Henrik Svensson have likewise packed the village’s structures with dense detail that is left enigmatic, though there are clues that something is definitely off. What’s in that big, yellow triangle-shaped building? And exactly why are there so many penises etched on walls?

The shit that goes down — and there is a lot of shit that goes down — is sure to inspire a million memes. After a slow simmer, with the village’s off-ness being ramped up degree by degree, it finally reaches a boil in a climax that makes the famous ending of The Wicker Man look like a documentary on the Fyre Festival. Despite the film’s focus seemingly having turned away from Dani and Christian to the many exotic distractions on display, it turns out it was still a relationship drama after all, and both Pugh and Reynor are extraordinary in a final reel that pushes their characters in some truly extreme directions. Midsommar tests not only its players but its viewers: it’s a ride, however, that any lover of cinema should take.

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‘Midsommar’ review – Ari Aster’s ‘Hereditary’ follow-up is genuinely disturbing tale of nature-worshiping pagans

Much like the success of Jordan Peel’s directorial debut Get Out allowed the New York filmmaker to follow up his 2017 film with this year’s more experimental Us , Ari Aster’s 2018 debut Hereditary made such an impact on audiences starved of original horror properties – $79 million made on a $10 million investment – that his new film, Midsommar , almost feels like he’s testing the limits of what he can now get away with.

Midsommar is the story of a grieving woman (Dani, played by Florence Pugh), in a shitty, broken relationship (with Christian, portrayed by the doe eyed Jack Reynor), who travels to Sweden to visit a pagan cult who are assembling for festivities held only every 90 years. Hey, we’ve all been there. And yet that really is, in terms of plot at least, all there is to it. Like Aster’s first film, there’s a little bit of mediation on grief early on. There’s an unnecessary subplot about PhD thesis rivalry come the film’s middle. But within 30 minutes, you know exactly where we’re going and pretty much exactly how we’re getting there. That’s not necessarily a criticism.

Much has been made of Aster’s Sweden-set, Hungary-filmed folk horror being the spiritual successor to 1973 classic The Wicker Man (and yet a central plot point is borrowed from 2006’s wretched Nick Cage helmed reboot). But in truth, while riffing on similar themes of nature-worshiping-crazies, Midsommar features little of the suspense that film contained. There’s no twists. No turns. It kind of resembles driving down the motorway and seeing a sign that says ‘Terror: 500 miles’. Then putting the pedal down and never turning off once. It’s more inspired by relationship dramas like Modern Romance and Scenes From A Marriage than it is any set horror text. Once again, none of this is necessarily a criticism.

More disturbing than terrifying, what Midsommer is, at the film’s diseased heart, is a comment on the misery of broken relationships. The endless jockeying for disparate needs to be met. The futility of two halves striving to become realigned. It’s been said that originally the film was supposed to be a more-conventional-than-not slasher movie, only set in a Swedish cult. Then Aster’s own relationship ended. The Swedish cult remained. The brutality of the slasher movie stayed. But what came in, and indeed what the film is framed around, is an attempt to capture the slow-mo trauma of a relationship that has stopped working, only nobody in it has really noticed yet. It’s a film about people dying horribly, yes. Often by their own choosing. And yet it’s the relationship at the fulcrum of the movie that’s most desperate to be offed.

At 147 minutes, Midsommer asks for investment. And it tests it too, with many scenes feeling like they’ve been included in a deliberate attempt to test the viewer’s patience. The result is an experience that almost feels meditative. The film is mostly set during the long daylight hours of northern Sweden in summer, often through the lens of hallucinogenic drugs, with the vibrancy and colour of nature (almost an inverse of Hereditary ’s aesthetic) bursting from the screen. It’s visuals like these which align with the searing sounds composed by Bobby Krlic, aka the Haxan Cloak, to create something almost transcendent. By the time the film concludes, you will be tired, you will be emotional, you will be confused. It’s been said that Aster actually wrote Midsommer ’s script while listening to Krlic’s 2013 record Excavation , an electrionic, instrumental opus inspired by the afterlife. Which explains a lot.

Midsommer is funnier than you’d expect it to be. Everyone cast within it – most notably Pugh, who feels like a superstar elect – turns in either excellent or extraordinary performances. And while it won’t be for everyone – those looking for the jump scares that populate multiplex horror will be disappointed, anyone lacking a strong constitution are advised to stay well away – Aster’s second movie really is extraordinary filmmaking. A movie that has found something unsaid within the genre to be said. A horror movie that is genuinely horrifying. Does Aster get away with it? And then some.

Screen Rant

Midsommar review: the director of hereditary goes full wicker man.

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Grand theft auto live-action movie concept trailer imagines samuel l. jackson's officer tenpenny, will smith as cj & more, 10 lowest-grossing dc movies, ranked from worst to best, midsommar is a mixed bag that blends unsettling horror with bizarre comedy, resulting in a film that's equal parts fascinating and frustrating..

Hereditary filmmaker Ari Aster is back with his second feature, Midsommar , and it's as messed up as his breakout effort... if also simply messier in general. Aster has long described the project as a breakup drama disguised as a folk horror movie, much in the same way that Hereditary is a familial tragedy that's been repackaged as a supernatural psycho-thriller. It's an apt description too; Aster's first two films feels like companion pieces to one another, thematically, and have many of the same strengths and flaws, along with some new issues in the case of his latter work. Midsommar is a mixed bag that blends unsettling horror with bizarre comedy, resulting in a film that's equal parts fascinating and frustrating.

Story-wise, Midsommar revolves around Christian (Jack Reynor) and Dani (Florence Pugh), a young American couple who're on the rocks; Christian has been wanting out of their relationship for almost a year but doesn't want to be the one to end things, whereas Dani is continually finding new ways to blame herself for Christian's distant and unsupportive behavior. After Dani suffers a horrifying personal tragedy, Christian invites her on a trip with his friends Mark (Will Poulter), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) to go visit Pelle's home village in Sweden and attend a mid-summer festival that they only hold every ninety years. And while the event seems a bit peculiar, if otherwise harmless, at first, Dani, Christian, and the others soon discover just how violent and disturbing this "celebration" truly is.

Jack Reynor and Florence Pugh in Midsommar

Aster's Midsommar script is at its strongest when it's focused on Christian and Dani's crumbling relationship, as opposed to the madness that ensues when they pair are vacationing (if that's the right word for it) in Europe. The film hits the ground running and brings Hereditary to mind in the way that it uses long takes and moody direction to further emphasize the sense of discomfort in the couple's interactions with one another, even before the harrowing incident that sets the larger plot in motion. Speaking of which: Aster once again proves that he has a knack for portraying the sheer impact and pain of emotional trauma with his filmmaking here, and really allows viewers to feel the weight of Dani's loss before pushing ahead with the rest of the story. And much like Hereditary was a showcase for Toni Collette, Midsommar gives Pugh room to truly shine as an actor and deliver a dynamic performance that traverses just about every emotion across the spectrum.

Unfortunately, Midsommar begins to run into trouble after that. By the time that Dani, Christian, and the others make their way to Pelle's village, the film starts to devolve into more of a stylish, but nevertheless predictable horror-thriller full of characters ignoring the blatant warning signs that something's not right, and continuing to act implausibly calm when people start mysteriously vanishing after the increasingly aberrant mid-summer festivities get underway. It doesn't help that most of the supporting players end up being pretty two-dimensional (Harper, for example, is basically playing Chidi from The Good Place , but with less personality), and largely seem to exist to be picked off on the way to the third act. It's also hard to not be reminded of The Wicker Man in this portion of the movie; as obvious as the comparison is, the horror classic was clearly an influence on Pelle's village and their deranged rituals and customs. Between that and its similarities to P.T. Anderson's The Master (another fever dream of a story about a damaged person who gets mixed up with a cult), Midsommar ends up feeling more derivative than Hereditary overall.

What's interesting, though, is that Midsommar 's core themes still land when they come back into focus in the third act; it's the indulgent weirdness in the build-up that dilutes the movie's overarching impact. Pugh deserves credit for being the glue that holds the film together throughout its rough patches, and delivering a performance that constantly reminds viewers: all the horror movie outlandishness aside, Midsommar is ultimately a story about a person who's struggling to let go of a toxic relationship and starts clinging to it even harder, following a traumatic turn of events. It also helps that Aster's script (generally) sees the twisted humor in much of what transpires in the story and embraces it, rather than trying to pretend that it doesn't exist. And of course, the film is beautifully shot by Aster and his Hereditary DP Pawel Pogorzelski; their usage of unnaturally sunny lighting and colors lends the whole thing an appropriately phantasmagoric, dream-like quality.

In the end, Aster doesn't suffer a sophomore slump with Midsommar , but he doesn't hit one out of the park either. Instead, the film amounts to an ambitious but sloppy offering that lands somewhere near the middle on the quality scale. Those who loved Hereditary and/or are fans of Pugh's work will probably enjoy this one more than others, and may be more forgiving of its shortcomings as a whole. On the other hand, those who found Aster's feature debut to be mostly off-putting and depraved for its own sake will probably want to take a pass on this one. Either way, it's hard to imagine that this one won't end up going down as the most WTF wide release of 2019.

Midsommar is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 140 minutes long and is rated R for disturbing ritualistic violence and grisly images, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!

Ari Aster's Midsommar follows a group of American college students who travel to a friend's isolated rural hometown in Sweden to experience their renowned midsummer festival. What starts out as idyllic quickly becomes a disconcertingly violent pagan ritual, with the friends engaged in a ruthless competition that will test more than just their friendship. Florence Pugh stars alongside Jack Reynor, Will Poulter, and William Jackson Harper.

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In other words, it’s all part of a super-elite reverie, too good true to be true. Before long, the audience begins to wonder the same thing that Frida does: What’s the catch? What’s the price? What’s really going on?

“Blink Twice” may remind you, at times, of “Midsommar,” Ari Aster’s sun-dappled white-cotton-dress bad-dream fantasia about a vacation taken by an American couple at a Swedish commune that turns out to be a cult. That movie had the dark pull of a forbidden fantasy. But “Blink Twice,” though it takes some very high-flying twists, is rooted in the sexual menace of the real world. The movie pings off the sagas of predators like Jeffrey Epstein, who brought vacationers (and fellow predators) to his getaway island, and Bill Cosby, who used drugs to commit his crimes. For a while in “Blink Twice,” there are clues that something very weird is going on. Frida drips steak juice onto her dress…and a bit later, the stain has vanished. She keeps noticing dirt under her fingernails. And what about the mysterious maid (María Elena Olivares) who keeps popping up like a figment out of “Don’t Look Now”? Her main job seems to be killing the big venomous yellow snakes who populate the island. But why?

Naomi Ackie, so superb as Whitney Houston in “I Wanna Dance with Somebody,” makes her mark here as a starstruck climber who knows how to turn on the cool. In short hair, she resembles an R&B star from the early ’60s, but she’s got an arrestingly layered contempo presence. We can see that Frida, who dreams of launching her own nail-design brand, idolizes Slater, to the point of infiltrating the white-walled King-Tech fundraising bash she’s been hired to waitress at. She thinks she’s hit the jackpot when he asks her to the island, even as her big flashing detective doe eyes start to register red flags (first one: that they have to give up their cell phones).

Frida has brought along her roommate and best friend, Jess (Alia Shawkat), and feels protected. The film seems to pivot around the idea that Slater, the mogul Prince Charming, has fallen for her. When we observe the wary interplay between her and Sarah (Adria Arjona, from “Hit Man”), a long-time star contestant on a “Survivor” reality show, we think that the rivalry between them is going to drive the story. But that’s just one of Kravitz’s sleight-of-hand gambits.

The men seem arrogant without being excessively creepy, from Christian Slater’s executive bigwig to Lucas the string-bean tech wizard (Levon Hawke) to Tom the cuddly geek (Haley Joel Osment) to Cody the chef, played by Simon Rex as an unctuous New Age food guru. They are not presented as villains, more like representative everydudes. But that’s kind of the point. As the film slowly reveals what’s going on, they emerge as versions of the Ben Kingsley character in “Death and the Maiden,” acting out the dark sides of ordinary men. Yet if Frida and her fellow island guests are victims, why, day after day, are they so in the dark about what’s going on?

Reviewed at Digital Arts, New York, Aug. 16, 2024. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 102 MIN.

Production: An Amazon MGM Studios release of a Free Association, This Is Important, Bold Choices production. Producers: Bruce Cohen, Tiffany Persons, Garret Levitz, Zoë Kravitz, Channing Tatum. Executive producers: Stacy Perskie, Jordan Harkins, Vania Schlogel.
Crew: Director: Zoë Kravitz. Screenplay: Zoë Kravitz, E.T. Feigenbaum. Camera: Adam Newport-Berra. Editor: Kathryn J. Schubert. Music: Chanda Dancy.
With: Naomie Ackie, Channing Tatum, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Adria Arjona, Haley Joel Osment, Geena Davis, Kyle MacLachlan, Alia Shawkat, Levon Hawke.

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Politics and giant brains and Cate Blanchett , oh my! These are just some of the things that await viewers in the truly bizarre Ari Aster -produced satire, Rumours . Since premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this past May, many have been wondering just what we can expect from this surreal political parody. Well, wonder no longer! Or, well, maybe wonder a little bit since the footage really doesn't share all that much, but the first trailer for Rumours gives just a taste of what's in store for Ari Aster's latest nightmare.

The trailer Bleecker Street released for Rumours is a teaser in every sense of the word. The 42-second teaser begins with a dinner taking place in the background, with the foreground featuring the various positive reviews and words of praise from a variety of outlets. Within moments, the trailer cuts to a montage of indecipherable images before the title card makes its grand debut on the screen.

What in the World is 'Rumours' About?

Rumours is directed by not one, not two, but three talented filmmakers with Evan Johnson , Galen Johnson , and Guy Maddin . Billed as part-political satire and part-horror comedy, Rumours showcases a G20 Summit consisting of seven of the world's most affluent and esteemed world powers. That may sound pretty straightforward and rudimentary, but before long, some strange and unexplainable events befall the summit attendees that can only be described as supernatural.

The official synopsis for Rumours reads as follows :

"These so-called leaders become spectacles of incompetence, contending with increasingly surreal obstacles in the mist woods as night falls and they realize they are suddenly alone. A genre-hopping satire of political ineptitude, the latest film from incomparable directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson is a journey into the absurd heat of power and institutional failure in a slowly burning world."

Tár star Cate Blanchett is just one of many stars who are a part of the ensemble cast of Rumours . Also in the mix are Roy Dupuis ( Shake Hands with the Devil ), Nikki Amuka-Bird ( Old ), Charles Dance ( Game of Thrones ), Takehiro Hira ( Shōgun ), Denis Ménochet ( Beau is Afraid ), Rolando Ravello ( Perfect Strangers ), Zlatko Buric ( Triangle of Sadness ), and Academy Award winner Alicia Vikander ( Ex Machina ). Ari Aster will be executive produced by Ari Aster - the filmmaker behind Hereditary , Midsommar , and Beau is Afraid .

Rumours releases exclusively in theaters on October 18th, 2024. You can read our review of Rumours by Collider's own Emma Kiely here .

rumours-movie-poster-showing-charles-dance-and-cate-blanchett-holding-hands.jpeg

Rumours (2024)

Rumours follows the leaders of seven wealthy democracies who find themselves lost in the woods during a G7 summit while drafting a statement on a global crisis. As they navigate the forest, they encounter bizarre threats like undead bog bodies and a giant brain. These surreal experiences expose the absurdities of their political lives and interactions, blending dark comedy with political satire.

Cate Blanchett

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Midsommar movie review & film summary (2019)
Some will be troubled by the excess in "Midsommar.". The unburdened surplus of lengthy customs does overshadow some of the film's potentially ripe avenues of interest, such as the scholarly rivalry between Christian and Josh, as well as racial dynamics that are only briefly hinted at. But the invigorating reward here is the ultimate ...
Midsommar
Oct 1, 2019 Full Review Jai Arjun Singh Firstpost Midsommar is packed with reminders that if a film succeeds in depicting the darkness within vividly, then a sunshine-y environment can make the ...
'Midsommar' Review: A Solstice Nightmare Unfolds In Broad Daylight
'Midsommar' Review: A Solstice ... Aster's new movie, Midsommar, doesn't pack quite as terrifying a knockout punch, but it casts its own weirdly hypnotic spell. This is a slow-burning and deeply ...
'Midsommar' Review: The Horror of Bad Relationships and Worse Vacations
A cautionary tale about bad relationships and worse vacations, "Midsommar" gets its creep on early. When it opens, Dani (Florence Pugh), its deeply troubled axis, is having a lousy day that ...
'Midsommar' Film Review
Film Review: 'Midsommar'. Ari Aster's ambitions outpace his execution in this follow-up to "Hereditary.". Whatever you think of the end result, there's always something thrilling about ...
Midsommar
Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 27, 2024. Whether you love it or hate it, Midsommar is memorable. Florence Pugh carries the story on her shoulders with an astonishingly compelling ...
Midsommar (2019)
Midsommar: Directed by Ari Aster. With Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper. A couple travels to Northern Europe to visit a rural hometown's fabled Swedish mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.
'Midsommar' Review
By John DeFore. June 18, 2019 10:31pm. The horror equivalent of a destination wedding, Ari Aster's Midsommar sends a troubled relationship and its most immediate witnesses to an exotic locale ...
Midsommar review: Horror film thrills with creepy Swedish communes and
Midsommar. thrills with creepy Swedish communes and endless sunshine: EW review. You can't be afraid of the dark in Midsommar, because darkness never comes. Everything that happens in writer ...
Review: In the unsettling 'Midsommar,' the nightmare unfolds in broad
The setting of "Midsommar," a luxuriant deep-tissue freakout from writer-director Ari Aster, is a picturesque commune in Hälsingland, Sweden, ... Movies. Review: A notorious day in L.A ...
"Midsommar," Reviewed: Ari Aster's Backward Horror Story of an American
Ari Aster is a writer and director of cult movies—his two features, "Hereditary," from 2018, and "Midsommar," which opened last week, are both grotesque and gory dramas about cults ...
Midsommar review: One of the year's strangest, most distressing, and
Midsommar might seem like an easy sell (people in flower crowns being creepy! Wicker Man vibes!), but it's far from an easy movie. It's strange and distressing at times, even a little ...
Midsommar Review: Ari Aster's Ambitious, Blurry Horror Trip
Midsommar might be the whitest horror movie ever made. The most ambitious horror blurs the line between the psychological and the mythic, between ordinary human emotions and symbol-laden Blakean ...
'Midsommar' review: 'Hereditary' director redefines horror with beauty
Effectively, the film turns the realism of its characters into yet another aspect of the film's surrealism. When the unusual starts to feel more real than the ordinary Credit: a24. In short, the ...
Midsommar Movie Review
Parents need to know that Midsommar is an extremely violent horror movie from the maker of Hereditary. It involves a sinister, ages-old ceremony that includes disturbing rituals. Characters are beaten and smashed, and bodies are cut up and burned (in some cases, alive). A character dies via suicide,….
Midsommar review: a nasty daylit nightmare from the director of ...
Midsommar is obsessed with the passage of time and the cycle of seasons, and the ways humans scramble to make sense of life's big changes (like death, aging, and breakups). Vox Rating: 4 out of 5
'Midsommar' Movie Review: Pagan Horror Gets a New Classic
'Midsommar' turns a break-up story into a funny, frightening 'Wicker Man' 2.0 — it's a pagan-horror classic, says Peter Travers. Our review.
Midsommar (2019)
MIDSOMMAR is a real mixed bag of a movie, with a decent first half. Florence Pugh gives a fine performance and the opening sequence is particularly powerful, getting off to a good footing. The slow-burning suspense works effectively until the genuine shocks of the 'cliff' sequence, but after this things really stop working.
Midsommar Review
Midsommar tests not only its players but its viewers: it's a ride, however, that any lover of cinema should take. A visceral, unique, utterly fucked-up experience that demands to be seen on the ...
'Midsommar' film review
Midsommar is the story of a grieving woman (Dani, played by Florence Pugh), in a shitty, broken relationship (with Christian, portrayed by the doe eyed Jack Reynor), who travels to Sweden to visit ...
Midsommar
Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) are a young American couple with a relationship on the brink of falling apart. But after a family tragedy keeps them together, a grieving Dani invites herself to join Christian and his friends on a trip to a once-in-a-lifetime midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. What begins as a carefree summer holiday in a land of eternal sunlight ...
Midsommar
Midsommar is a 2019 folk horror film written ... on July 10, 2019. The film grossed $48 million and received positive reviews, with praise for Aster's direction and Pugh's performance in particular, although it polarized general audiences. ... [45] while Screen Rant writer Mark Birrell said it was "one of the most polarizing horror movies of ...
Midsommar (2019) Movie Review
Midsommar is now playing in U.S. theaters nationwide. It is 140 minutes long and is rated R for disturbing ritualistic violence and grisly images, strong sexual content, graphic nudity, drug use and language. Let us know what you thought of the film in the comments section!
'Blink Twice' Review: Zoë Kravitz Proves She's a Total Filmmaker
'Blink Twice' Review: Zoë Kravitz Proves She's a Total Filmmaker in a #MeToo-Meets-'Midsommar' Thriller Starring a Sinister Channing Tatum Reviewed at Digital Arts, New York, Aug. 16, 2024.
A Giant Brain Ruins Cate Blanchett's Night in First 'Rumours' Teaser
Ari Aster will be executive produced by Ari Aster - the filmmaker behind Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid. Rumours releases exclusively in theaters on October 18th, 2024.

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“Midsommar,” Reviewed: Ari Aster’s Backward Horror Story of an American Couple in Sweden

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