Midsommar (2019)
Where do I begin with Midsommar? Where does anyone begin with Midsommar? This is not a film that can be critiqued in any meaningful way. It’s not good or bad. It doesn’t require you to like or dislike it. It’s within the genre of horror, yet it doesn’t illicit any sense of horror in the gruesome, disturbing, and violent images that are shown to us here. I have no earthly idea what Ari Aster was trying to accomplish here. He made one of the best horror films of the past 30 years with Hereditary which showed him to a be a new master architect of terror. Hereditary left me shattered for a about a day or so. Midsommar left me nonplussed and amused. In other words, numb to what you’d otherwise consider to be an exercise in extreme horror, violence, and torture. By the end, I realized that was the entire point. Ari Aster made me watch a horrifying movie without even knowing it. Like Hereditary, Midsommar’s main focus is on a young woman, Dani, who is stricken with shock and grief. She just
