Midsommar || Your Ex Girlfriend's Fantasy

Midsommar Movie Review

You can tell how visually stunning this movie it's by its poster!

Midsommar is a horror movie written and directed by Hereditary fame Ari Aster starring Florence Pugh, Will Poulter, and Jack Reynor. 

'A couple travel to Sweden to visit their friend's rural hometown for its fabled midsummer festival, but what begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.' - Official Movie Premise

Now this movie came out in 2019 and went unnoticed by me, somehow but in the ongoing lockdown I got to finally see this movie. I loved hereditary on all the fronts as an entertaining as well as a serious movie. going into Midsommar I had expected at least to be scared but Nah, I was totally disappointed. 

I have a mixed feeling whether I liked this movie or not but let's just get on with the review and try to find out whether you should watch it or not because it's a two and a half-hour-long film.

What I Liked?

• The Plot & The Direction

A Drug Trip

Dani Ardor is a girl traumatized with her family issues, is currently in a kind of uninteresting relationship with Christian who is tired of her trying to find a way out of the relationship.  Peele, Christian's friend decides to take all of his friends, five of them, to his hometown commune to witness a ritual which only happens once in 90 years. This town is run by a cult and as it happens in all the cult-related movies, we and our characters slowly start witnessing the bizarre things that happen in this cult. I'll talk about spoilers in the 'What I Did Not Like' section.

On paper, this always sounds interesting. I'm always interested in this kind of cult horrors because even if it's not supernatural it turns out horror. Watch Netflix's Wild Wild Country. The fact that cults are real and people like Jim Jones and Charles Manson killed people because of this cult thing horrifies me. 

Why the sun has a rapey face?

The bizarreness that was expected is here in the film. We get to some pretty messed up stuff throughout the film. It's an Ari Aster movie so you can expect weirdness to go off the charts. The same feeling of uneasiness seen in Hereditary is here. You just cannot explain what but you keep getting this feeling throughout the film. I love it.

The movie has a few layers and it tries to talk about grief and relationships and religion. It was an okayish attempt and we can watch the movie multiple times to understand it.

• The Acting

Wonderland

This movie is totally carried by the acting and trust me you will love Florence Pugh in this movie. She has given an amazing performance. After my watch, the first thing I searched watched her name because I was so impressed by her acting. The character development through which her character goes through is zero to a hundred. She had a broad range of emotions to be conveyed to give justice to her character and Florence Pugh did it elegantly. Her breakdown segments were excellent. She looks beautiful with a heavily decorated dress in later half of the movie. I'm really excited to see her in Black Widow.

Will Poulter was there as comic relief and Jack Reynor has given an excellent performance. 

Other actors were good too and all of them felt like people brought straight from a real cult commune.

• Camerawork

Wallpaper level stuff, right?

Midsommar is a visually stunning movie. The color palette here is vast and the movie has a very natural feel to it. Instead of making the frames vibrant, the object of interest are made vibrant. 

There is a lot of stuff happening in this movie and the way the filmmakers tried to give visual cues as to what's happening is quite commendable. The devil really is in the details.

As an Ari Aster movie, it has those long, unsettling takes which even remain the same when some disturbing things are happening on the screen. You want the scene to cut as soon as possible but it doesn't. The way the movie is edited helps to retain that same feel throughout the movie.

• Now I can't say much about the soundtrack as it was hardly there but whatever was there, it was haunting.

What I Did Not Like?

• The Plot

When your movie is delayed because of the CoronaVirus.

SPOILERS: The movie is two and a half-hour long but it feels it could have been cut to two hours. The early half-hour of the movie feels very unnecessary and could have been told in a different way to save time. The whole part is about Dani's sister committing suicide and also killing her family. Now, this whole scene plays out in a way that you think that this plot point will be linked or used in later half of the movie but it never happens. 

The movie tries to talk about issues with relationships but the way the issues are resolved in this film will remind you of your ex-girlfriend. There are a feminazi's wet dream and fantasy in this movie and have some of the most controversial scenes in my recent memory. There would have been an uproar in the feminist community if the gender roles were switched.

The movie is predictable. The foreshadowing is done constantly and you know exactly what will happen next if you have watched enough horror films. There is no twist or pay off which brings me to the next point i.e. the movie lacks a climax. There is nothing that resolves anything. Things just happen throughout the film. Some work some don't.

I wanted the cult to be more interesting but it's not. Ari Aster tried to give importance to the small details and ended up creating big errors in this movie. 

The characters that are shown in this movie are one of the stupidest people I have seen in a horror movie. There is not a single intelligent character in this movie. The decisions these people make very unreal. There is no character development and they only work as cannon fodder for the cult.

Finally, the pretentiousness of the film. The film tries too hard to act like a deeply layered movie which it isn't. The film is unintentionally funny at times which takes away the seriousness that it wanted. 

After the film finished, I felt nothing. I kept asking like what was the point of all of this. This movie is hailed as one of the best horror flicks of the decade but to me, it is not. 

Final Verdict

If you want to watch something disturbing, unsettling with a touch of body horror then this movie is for you. I liked the relationship part of this movie and also liked the feeling of uneasiness I felt while watching the movie. There are things in this movie that will appeal to you if you loved Hereditary or The Witch. If you want to watch a good horror movie under lockdown you can give Midsommar a try. It's a good mix bag of a film. If you are going through a tough relationship issue then I will suggest you to definitely watch this film if its two and a half hour runtime doesn't concern you.

Midsommar is streaming on Amazon Prime.