Midsommar

A long-overdue stay in the village of Harga ... and what can I say? It’s great! The best couples therapy / horror about the ultimate evil and a relationship destroyer called a thesis. I've seen a lot of ambitious US horror movies in recent years that were inadvertently funny. What at first glance seems to affect the viewer's psyche as an extract from psychotropic, or perhaps even poisonous mushrooms, in fact resembles, after watching the film, the unpleasant come-down after smoking an excessive amount of marijuana cigarettes, which contain more twigs and other unpleasant ingredients. The film combines ridicule of practices that are common in sects and a bizarrely-constructed drama with the theme of toxic relationships. It works like a anthropological study written in the manic phase. In a year from now, our entire family is going to be dead. Along with Get Out, it’s the peak of the wave of indie horror films. Bye - Ari Zoroaster aka Josef Midsommar. (21/11/2019)

Midsommar is a film that will best serve people who are seeking inspiration for a very spectacular way to break up. Aster again lags behind his own ambitions. Midsommar ostentatiously gives the impression that it wants to be an essential contribution to the horror genre. However, the long runtime, slowness and seriousness emanating from the grandiose filming of everyday scenes (camera crane FTW!) and the coldly methodical, mechanically timed editing do not guarantee great depth of thought or psychology (the comparison with Bergman, who did not pretend to be enigmatic, is laughable). When you shoot a psychological horror movie and let the actors ham it up and the characters behave like idiots who do not mind the fact that people are disappearing around them, you pull the rug out from under yourself. In the final third of the film, it is as if Aster is so attached to his effort to build tension that he completely forgets to develop the banal, straightforwardly told story and to concern himself with whether the characters’ actions are consistent. Though noteworthy from an anthropological point of view and nourishing for interpretive adventurers, the attempt to pound into our head with every shot the fact that something scary is about to happen (which is paradoxically less effective than subtler hints would be) and that we are watching a tremendously sophisticated horror film becomes increasingly annoying as the minutes drag by. I could much better imagine Midsommar as a musical comedy (it is actually not far from being just that, though not intentionally) about a group of doped-up flower children singing and dancing in a meadow, wearing animal costumes and familiarising themselves with a foreign culture and cuisine, including, among other things, meat pie with baked female pubic hair. Ari Aster is not a bad director and he knows how to create a dense atmosphere in individual scenes. He would just be better served by considering what is enough. 70% (25/07/2019)

Ari Aster and Jordan Peele are the John Carpenter and David Cronenberg of the 21st Century without question! Midsommar is one of those controversial horror films that isn't very rewarding to viewers and will only please the more discerning and, above all, patient ones, who will, however, be solidly rewarded. The biggest downside is the slower pace (almost nothing interesting happens for the first hour), but from the first "ceremony" the film starts to get more and more interesting and above all disturbing. The whole mythology of the Swedish pagan community is interesting enough, novel and very unpredictable. A big plus is Florence Pugh, who gives a breathtaking performance (definitely the most talented young actress of our time), the music is also perfect, very unconventional for a horror film, but fits perfectly here. There is also very creative cinematography and the absolute biggest attraction is of course the gore, which Ari Aster serves up in such a shocking way that weaker viewers will prefer to give up and leave the film. The ending is typically symbolic and incredibly morbid (I've never seen anything weirder). Slow, creepy, disturbing, shocking, unorthodox and powerfully controversial is what Midsommar is. I liked Hereditary a bit more, but this is also a gem. PS: Those teens that go to the cinema cinema just because they see the horror genre and want to jump out of their seats, they must have been very surprised at what they actually got. 80% (09/07/2019)

It's like a modern The Witch meets 1973’s The Wicker Man. Midsommar is a concentrated, poetic, psychological horror film, but it doesn't scare simply by shocking and frightening – it scares by its creeping unpredictability, where we know how someone will end up, yet we have no earthly idea what will happen to them or when. Hereditary rather disappointed me, but Aster's second film has already won it for me by a landslide. The opening, in which we get to know the characters and their relationships, is already impeccable, but after the flight to Sweden it's hard to find words to describe the atmosphere that ensues. And how it is filmed! Imaginative camera angles and editing, long and absorbing shots, plus "live" music and one heathen stranger than the other. I look forward to seeing it again – I know exactly what to focus on. (02/08/2019)

A bizarre mindfuck full of Nordic cults, precise camerawork and a tense atmosphere that gradually builds into an unadulterated inferno. The depiction of violence and murder doesn't matter, on the contrary it is fresh, crisply shot and at times very intense with the help of the music and the skill of the filmmakers. An interesting mix of dark relationship drama, set in even darker interiors and exteriors (the first half), where everyone finds their own thing about both protagonists, and an over-lit feast for the eyes, where everyone is nice before the murders begin. Paradoxically, while the relationship drama has power and tends to emerge from the darkness, the seemingly positive, lavishly photographed natural scenery of the wilderness is full of light, but here the adage that it’s darkest under the candlestick is doubly true. Bold filmmaking that hasn't been here in such a form and with such a unique directorial style for a long time. (28/06/2020)