Review of Midsommar (2019) by Marshallcavalli — 15 Aug 2019

After watching Hereditary, I was curious to know what was to come next. Boy, was I amazed. Midsommar is the story of Dani, a young woman who's friend killed her own parents and committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Her grief has manifested with in herself as she tries to get over it. But when her boyfriend is going to Sweden to experience the midsommar festival in a local commune, which happens every 90 years. Look, before I say anymore, I must preface this by saying that you should see this film. It is fantastic. No seriously it is. It is one of the best films of the year. I will avoid spoilers if possible, but I make no promises.

With that said, there are some problems I personally have with the film as a whole. The script needed to be tighter, just like with Hereditary. There are some extremely goofy lines that shouldn't been in there. Most of them come from the character of Mark, played by the fantastic Will Poulter. Others just are tonally dissonant, such as the Austin Powers line. Moments of this film reminded me of Hereditary and it has a tenuous connection of loss and how one can deal with it. Ari Aster should have connected them in theme, to give the film an interesting dichotomy of loss of a family member versus a loss of a friend and how that can affect a person and their life. While the acting is phenomenal, the camera and direction feels at times meandering. Struggling to conclude in the last stretch of the feature. The first half was great and built tension, so why go in such a different direction than what was started. It isn't that it comes completely out of left field, but I don't see why you should end it the way it does. There is a scene in the film that will shock you very early on, when the older characters have to a ritual that will shock the protagonists. To me, I started to notice that he was making more of a exploitive angle to what he's trying to do. I don't mind personally, because I love movies that are provocative such as Caligula, Death Race 2000, and Antichrist. For this film, it doesn't work with the tone its trying to set. This is a serious art house horror film that deals with cults, do we really need close ups of the aftermath?

Say what you want about Natural Born Killers, the tone was all over the place and made sense to have a random animated sequence in the film. Midsommar is far better than that, but the tone is crucial to making a horror film work or any other type of film for that matter. Midsommar is an excellent feature by Ari Aster, with stellar performances and production behind it making it great. But it honestly needed another writer to make the story grounded in reality, some minor editing choices changed and a tone correction would give the film an iconic status as one of the greats. As it is, this film is excellent and you should see it.