'Midsommar' Is a Flawed, But Effectively Scary Horror Film with Great Performances

I don't know about you, but I've never found the appeal of cults. I mean, one minute, they're dancing and drinking and smoking weed, and then the next, they're MURDERING YOU.

And because of this movie, I now refuse to go anywhere that has hundreds of happy white people dressed in white who perform all of their actions in sync with everyone else. I'd rather stay in New York City eating baby back ribs watching the Independence Day fireworks, thank you very much.

But anyways, here's the review!

Midsommar is a folk horror film written and directed by Ari Aster. This film stars Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor as an American couple who go with some friends to Sweden for a midsummer festival, which ends up turning to the dark as their rituals become more and more disturbing.

Now, last night, I watched Aster's previous film, Hereditary, and I thought it was fantastic. It was the scariest film I had ever seen, and I was curious to see how his sophomore film would turn out. And I was a tiny bit disappointed.

The Good

Don't get me wrong; I did like this movie. I thought this film was good, and as of now, I'm not gonna connect it to Hereditary because they're two very different films, and I really did like this movie.

Firstly, the editing is perfect. I love the way Aster cuts between scenes at the perfect time and uses sound to put us on edge. That doesn't mean jump scares, because this movie doesn't have those, but he does a good job of using sound and music to make us feel uneasy and build suspense.

Florence Pugh's performance is great. She does a great job in the emotional scenes, and I think Aster is really good at directing actors. I had actually seen Pugh earlier this year in Fighting With My Family, when she had an English accent.

She has an American accent in this movie, and it was so convincing that I was convinced that she WAS an American and she just used an English accent for Fighting With My Family. Her accent and her emotions especially during the scenes where her character has panic attacks were fantastic.

Everyone in this movie was really good and convincing in their roles. Will Poulter provided a bit of comic relief to the film, and everyone—from the leads to the extras—gave great performances in this film.

The cinematography is also really beautiful. It's a very good-looking movie that is also directed to perfection by Aster. He uses a lot of long takes during the dialogue scenes, and they're all really interesting because of certain choices he makes, like locking down the camera and having one character in the frame, with the reflection of another also in the frame.

I also really loved the relationships between the characters. They felt very real and like with Hereditary, there's a good amount of real drama between characters that feels very real on top of being a horror film.

And I enjoyed the amount of ambiguity there was in this movie. It's another movie that makes us think about it after we watch it, and I love when not everything is spelled out for an audience, and we are left to connect the dots.

The Horror

Now, is this a scary film? Well, fear is subjective, but I thought this movie wasn't exactly frightening. I don't mean that to be a slight towards this film, because the movie is genuinely suspenseful.

The movie has a lot of tension in it, and the events that occur in the movie are objectively disturbing and frightening. There were some really disturbing scenes in this movie that I needed to block my eyes for, but it could feel like this movie was relying too much on blood and gore for a scare.

The Story

In my opinion, the weakest aspect of this movie was the story. At its core, this movie's general premise is relatively simple but I felt as if this movie wasn't as consistently engaging as your average horror film.

This film moves at a bit of a slow pace. We don't see anything truly scary until about an hour into the film and there are times where several scenes go by and you realize that the story has remained in about the same place for the past few scenes.

We also have the first 20 minutes in this movie, which I'm not gonna spoil, but they don't feel like they add very much to the overall narrative. It serves as a way to get us to sympathize with Pugh's character, but the events don't really ever come back into play when we see the cult stuff.

At times, this film can feel very uneventful. Because there are scary scenes here and there, but a lot of this film simply feels like a drama than a horror/thriller. This movie didn't do a great job of balancing the normal scenes with the scary cult scenes.

I'm gonna connect this again back to Aster's previous film, Hereditary, and why I believe that is a superior film. That movie had a lot of drama in it as well, and a lot of the horror came from watching the family get torn apart by grief, loss, guilt, and supernatural forces.

But this movie didn't do quite as good of a job exploring those themes and making us truly feel sorry for these characters and what happens to them, and while I thought the relationships and conflicts were realistic, I wasn't very invested in the characters and because of that, the story didn't feel as interesting as it could have been.

Overall

Overall, I think this is a good film. The amount of ambiguity in the ending and how we don't quite know what will happen next is comparable to Us, Jordan Peele's horror film from earlier this year.

But I think Us is superior because this movie didn't have a very compelling narrative, but this movie is improved by the performances and Aster's masterful direction. On a technical level, this movie is wonderful, but I didn't find it to be too scary, and there are some minor issues here and there.

I'm gonna give 'Midsommar' an 8/10 (B+).

Now, how will you react to this movie? I can't say for sure but I know that this movie isn't for everybody. Some will like it for its direction, and others won't like it due to its dedication to surrealism and ambiguity over a perfect story.

But overall, I liked it, and I can't wait to see what Aster does next in his career. Thank you for reading.