Film Review: Midsommar (2019)
For decades, the horror film as a genre has been consigned to a commercial cinema “ghetto”, often considered unworthy of true Seventh Art status. This marginalisation persists despite the genre’s foundational role in cinema history, from the German Expressionist movement to the psychological terrors of Hitchcock. Occasionally, a renowned auteur like Stanley Kubrick would dabble in the form, most notably with The Shining, yet attempts to reconcile horror with arthouse sensibilities remained a relatively recent phenomenon. One of the most notable and ambitious examples of this reconciliation is Midsommar, the 2019 film written and directed by Ari Aster. Positioned as a “break-up film dressed in the clothes of a folk horror”, Midsommar strives to elevate genre tropes through meticulous art-house craft, glacial pacing, and a suffocating study of grief and relational decay. While it achieves a certain hypnotic, unsettling power, the film ultimately stumbles under the weight of its own derivations and a predictable narrative arc that undermines its artistic aspirations.
The film opens in the dead of an American winter, introducing us to Dani Ardor (Florence Pugh), a psychology student teetering on the edge of a protracted breakup with her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor). Her fragile world shatters completely when she receives the cataclysmic news that her mentally ill sister has murdered their parents before taking her own life. Christian, out of a guilt-tinged obligation, postpones the relationship’s end. Several months later, he receives an invitation from his Swedish friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), to attend a once-every-90-years Midsommar festival at his ancestral commune in Hälsingland. Christian’s crass friends, Mark (Will Poulter) and the academically driven Josh (William Jackson Harper), are also invited. In a move born of pity rather than desire, Christian reluctantly invites the still-grieving Dani. Upon arrival, the group is joined by another outsider couple, Connie (Ellora Torchia) and Simon (Archie Madekwe), invited by Pelle’s brother.
From the outset, Aster establishes a stark dichotomy. The initial American sequences are cloaked in cold, blue-tinged darkness, a visual representation of Dani’s isolation and depression. This contrasts violently with the Swedish setting, which is bathed in an almost blinding, perpetual daylight. Pelle presents the commune, Hårga, as a pastoral utopia, a community living in harmony with nature and ancient tradition. The initial cordiality, however, is quickly undercut by unease. Dani experiences a harrowing bad trip after being given psychedelic mushrooms, a sequence shot with disorienting, breathing visuals that externalise her internal trauma. The guests soon notice the community’s strange, pagan iconography and its rigid social structure based on strict age segregation. The rituals escalate from the oddly charming to the profoundly sinister, culminating in the film’s first major set piece: the ättestupa. Here, two of the commune’s eldest members commit ritual senicide by leaping from a high cliff onto a rock below. When one survives the impact, the community’s elder calmly finishes the job with a ceremonial mallet, as the entire group emits a synchronised groan of shared agony. This moment is less a shock tactic and more a brutal thesis statement: this society operates on a collectivist logic where individual life is subsumed to the cyclical needs of the whole.
Horrified, Dani and several others wish to leave. Yet Christian and Josh, anthropologists at heart, rationalise the act as a mere cultural difference to be studied, not judged. This academic detachment becomes their fatal flaw. The village elders, amused by their curiosity, grant them research access under the condition of anonymity. What follows is a slow, inexorable unraveling. The other guests—Connie, Simon, Mark, and Josh—begin to disappear under mysterious circumstances. Meanwhile, Christian becomes the target of a ritualised seduction by a teenage girl, Maja (Isabelle Grill), orchestrated by the community to secure “new blood”. The tension culminates during the maypole dance competition, a gruelling test of endurance where Dani, swept up in the communal emotion and psychedelic influence, is crowned May Queen. This victory coincides with the elders’ final, sinister plan for Christian, drawing the film to its infamous, fiery conclusion.
Ari Aster arrived at Midsommar riding a wave of acclaim from his feature debut, Hereditary (2018). Both films were produced and distributed by A24, a studio that had carved a niche in marrying arthouse aesthetics with genre fare. Following Hereditary’s success, Aster was approached by Swedish production company B-Reel with a proposition to make a slasher film set in Sweden. Initially reluctant, he found a way into the material through personal experience, channeling his own relationship breakdowns into the crumbling dynamic between Dani and Christian. This personal underpinning is crucial; it shifts the film’s core horror from external pagan threats to the internal horror of a relationship sustained only by inertia and guilt.
This focus dictates Aster’s methodical, slow-burn approach. For its first hour, Midsommar functions less as a horror film and more as a deeply sad psychological drama about grief and emotional abandonment. The horror seeps in at the edges, gradually saturating the frame like a poison. This deliberate pacing results in a 147-minute runtime—unusually protracted for a horror film—which proved divisive. Purists who equate horror with relentless tension and jump scares often dismissed Midsommar as not a “proper” genre entry. However, this criticism misunderstands Aster’s intent. The slow pace is the film’s primary engine of dread. It allows Aster to build an atmosphere of pervasive wrongness, where the sun-drenched fields and smiling faces become increasingly threatening. He uses long, static, and wide shots, often centred like a tableau, forcing the audience to scrutinise the frame for disturbing details: the cryptic runes, the unsettling tapestry depicting the guests’ fates, the passive-aggressive interactions within the commune. This visual patience makes the eruptions of graphic violence—the crushed head, the blood eagle, the ritualistic sex—feel all the more visceral and shocking. Aster’s battle with the MPAA over the film’s rating centred largely on this graphic content, yet it is the contrast between the film’s bright, beautiful aesthetic and its brutal acts that generates its unique discomfort.
Where Midsommar is most effective is in its atmospheric construction and its nuanced portrayal of Dani’s psychological journey. Florence Pugh’s performance is a monumental achievement. She portrays Dani’s all-consuming grief with raw, trembling vulnerability, making her gradual absorption into the Hårga collective feel like a tragic, yet perversely logical, resolution. The community offers her what Christian cannot: a shared emotional burden. Their synchronised weeping mirrors her isolated sobs in the film’s opening; their communal celebration of her as May Queen provides the validation and belonging her relationship lacked. The film’s final shot, as Dani watches the temple burn with a tear-streaked, ambiguous smile, is a masterclass in ambiguous catharsis. Has she found a new family, or has she simply traded one prison for another?
Yet, for all its technical prowess and psychological insight, Midsommar’s most significant flaw is its lack of narrative originality and its ultimate predictability. The film leans heavily on well-worn genre tropes, particularly the “city folk vs. primitive locals” dynamic that has fuelled horror from 1960s onwards. Aster attempts a subversion by presenting the rural “primitives” not as backward, inbred rednecks, but as an orderly, aesthetically pleasing hippie commune. This, however, is a surface-level tweak. The narrative trajectory—outsiders lured to a secluded community, gradual realisation of danger, systematic picking-off of the group—remains utterly familiar. The film’s debt to Robin Hardy’s 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man is profound and, at times, cripplingly overt.
Both films feature a devoutly principled outsider (Sergeant Howie/the grieving Dani) entering an isolated, pagan community under false pretences. Both communities use sexuality and ritual to disorient the protagonist. Both narratives build towards a ceremonial climax where the outsider is chosen as a sacrificial figure in a pagan festival. The key difference lies in perspective. The Wicker Man builds a genuine dramatic conflict between two worldviews—the Christian rigidity of Howie and the pagan order of Summerisle. The film allows the audience to question which side, if any, holds moral authority, culminating in an ending that is tragic, thought-provoking, and iconic. Midsommar, by contrast, lacks this ideological ambiguity. The Hårga are presented as unequivocally sinister from the moment of the ättestupa; their rituals are brutal and their manipulation overt. Christian and his friends are not principled but pathetic—academically arrogant, emotionally stunted, and culturally insensitive. This reduces the conflict to a simple dichotomy: a toxic, decaying modernity versus a brutal, but cohesive, primitivism. Dani’s choice is thus less a complex moral dilemma and more a desperate flight from one form of suffering into another, arguably worse, form. The ending, while visually stunning, lacks the shocking, philosophical resonance of Howie’s fate inside the Wicker Man. We see it coming, and its meaning feels pre-digested.
Furthermore, Aster’s meticulous research into Norse pagan customs, while impressive, often feels like anthropological set-dressing rather than organic world-building. The rituals can seem like a checklist of shocking acts designed to provoke the audience, rather than practices born of a fully realised belief system. The film’s middle section sags under the weight of this ritualistic exposition, as the audience waits for the inevitable to unfold.
Despite these criticisms, Midsommar was a commercial success and largely acclaimed by critics, cementing Aster’s status as a premier voice in arthouse horror and catapulting Florence Pugh to stardom. Its achievements in direction, cinematography, and central performance are undeniable. Yet, as a piece of narrative art, it ultimately feels like a beautifully crafted, supremely confident cover version of a classic song. It amplifies certain themes—grief, relational alienation—with modern intensity and visual bravura, but it fails to escape the long shadow cast by its most obvious predecessor. The Wicker Man remains the more intellectually daring and structurally surprising film, its flaws born of low-budget ambition rather than high-concept calculation. Midsommar is a fascinating, often breathtaking, experience, but its horrors are those of execution and atmosphere, not of truly novel ideas.
RATING: 7/10 (+++)
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