Midsommar (2019)

Everyone understands your pain. That is how they get you to stay.

Written and directed by Ari Aster · Approximately 147 minutes, theatrical cut
Starring: Florence Pugh · Jack Reynor · William Jackson Harper · Vilhelm Blomgren · Will Poulter

Source-based first draft. Verdict and advisories are proposed; numerical Corny DNA remains unscored. Explore Ari Aster in the catalog.

Some people make a breakup awkward. Ari Aster provides a communal dining arrangement, a complicated timetable and enough flowers to close a garden centre. Midsommar is spectacularly excessive, but its most uncomfortable observation is small: somebody who feels tolerated at home may be terribly grateful to feel wanted elsewhere.

Dani, played by Florence Pugh, travels to Sweden with her boyfriend Christian and his friends after a devastating family loss. The official synopsis and credits establish the trip and Aster's authorship. What matters to the horror is the gap between the welcome Dani receives and what that welcome may require of her. The film makes belonging attractive enough to become dangerous.

Before you watch

Severe bereavement, a family murder-suicide, depicted ritual suicides and graphic violence are central. There are mutilated bodies, sustained simulated sex, explicit nudity, psychedelic drug use and distressing hallucinations. Sexual coercion and seriously impaired consent matter to a later sequence. Animal remains and troubling treatment of disability are also present. The BBFC advice corroborates the principal content; revealing contexts have a separate disclosure.

Specific content details (contains spoilers)

A man participates in a sexual ritual while heavily intoxicated and under organised social and physical pressure. The film also raises concerns about the young woman’s conditioning.
A dead bear is cut open and its remains are used in a ritual.

The relationship is already a difficult place to live

Pugh's performance makes Dani's grief physically inconvenient. It arrives when conversation is supposed to continue normally; it makes reassurance necessary precisely when Christian wants to stop providing it. She tries to minimise her needs before anyone can resent them. The effort is exhausting to watch because it is so recognisable.

Jack Reynor makes Christian evasive rather than magnificently wicked. He can avoid a decision, borrow somebody else's idea and treat the resulting difficulty as an unfortunate thing that happened to him. His failings have the texture of ordinary selfishness. The horror gains something from that scale: a relationship does not need a grand villain to become a miserable place to ask for care.

The surrounding friends supply uncomfortable comedy through their assumptions about the trip. Research, sex and personal convenience become competing reasons to treat the community as a resource. Those attitudes deserve criticism, but they do not make whatever happens to the visitors a deserved punishment. The film's balance becomes shakier whenever a person's disposability starts to feel like the punchline.

Daylight makes everything available for inspection

The Swedish setting is bright, expansive and carefully arranged. Darkness cannot provide the usual excuse for failing to see what is happening. Instead, distance, politeness and the crowd's composure persuade the visitors to keep looking without necessarily acting.

Paweł Pogorzelski's photography gives the communal spaces an unnerving clarity. People sit in patterns, move together and occupy an image as though somebody has already assigned the correct place for each of them. The effect contrasts sharply with Dani's uncertainty about where she belongs among her own companions.

The hallucinatory movement within flowers and surfaces works because the basic compositions remain legible. Perception becomes unreliable inside a world that looks insistently orderly. Aster gets considerably more dread from that friction than he would from simply making the countryside look sinister on arrival.

Being heard is a powerful recruitment tool

The community's shared emotional responses offer something Dani has been missing. Other people appear willing to meet an expression of pain with an expression of pain. Pugh lets the relief of that recognition coexist with bewilderment, making the attraction intelligible without making the group benign.

The useful question is what happens to individual judgment when a community provides all the available interpretations. A ceremony comes with an explanation; objections come with a patient answer; an outsider's distress can be treated as evidence that they have not yet understood. Compassion and control begin using the same voice.

That is the film's strongest argument. It also gives the cheerful surfaces more purpose than a simple reversal of horror lighting conventions. Feeling better can become one part of a system that makes leaving, dissenting or recognising another person's suffering harder.

The excess has an uneven cost

At nearly two and a half hours, the theatrical cut gives repetition room to become oppressive. Meals, explanations and social discomfort accumulate. That duration helps establish how a visitor's resistance might wear down; it can also make the middle stretch feel as though the destination is waiting while everybody completes the itinerary.

Some supporting characters remain more useful to the design than interesting in themselves. William Jackson Harper gives Josh a specific academic investment, but the film's interest in the visitors narrows as its central emotional arrangement grows more elaborate. The imbalance helps Dani's viewpoint dominate while reducing the human weight of other losses.

The community's disabled oracle presents another limitation. Its discussion of inbreeding is disturbing ideology within the story, yet using a disabled person as an ominous visual and symbolic accessory can reproduce a familiar horror shorthand. Calling the villagers sinister does not settle that representational choice.

The film is accomplished enough that these reservations deserve to be specific. There is no need to invent a complaint that bright flowers are insufficiently frightening. Pugh's emotional precision and the organisation of the frame do the substantial work.

Which version?

This draft uses the approximately 147-minute theatrical cut: A24 lists 2h27m and the BBFC cinema record times it at 146m54s. The 171-minute director's cut is a distinct longer version. Its additional material needs a separate edition check before claims about its pacing or scenes are folded into this review. A shorter home-media timing alone does not establish an alternate edit.

Corny DNA

Ceremonial extravagance and dreadful social comedy are deliberate pleasures. The floral escalation can be funny and alarming in the same image. The grief remains sincere, and the film's weirdness does not make it a recommendation for affectionate mockery. The six numerical axes remain for the owner's assessment.

Verdict

Watch with caveats — proposed. A qualified recommendation for Pugh's performance, the daylight staging and an unsettling account of how belonging can compromise judgment. The caveats include severe grief and sexual-coercion material, deliberate repetition and a tendency to subordinate supporting lives to the central emotional design. Viewers seeking brisk folk-horror mechanics may find the stay too long; those interested in the attraction of a dangerous community have considerably more to examine.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

The smile belongs to a very organised system

Christian is drawn into the drug-affected sex ritual with Maja, then paralysed. As May Queen, Dani chooses him as the final sacrifice; he is placed inside a bear's remains and burned with the other offerings. Her distress eventually becomes a smile. The scene account corroborates those events without settling what her expression means.

Reading the smile as relief is supported by Dani's emotional trajectory. Treating it as proof that the community has healed her requires overlooking its manipulation and murder. She has gained recognition inside a system that arranged the available choices. Her moment of apparent agency is also evidence of how thoroughly the group now controls the terms.

Christian's earlier selfishness does not make the sexual ritual harmless or turn his killing into proportionate revenge. Heavy intoxication, communal pressure and physical intervention make the consent concern substantial. Reynor's interview about the role describes his interest in exposing a male character to the vulnerability and humiliation often assigned to women in horror. That context supports attention to his victimisation; it does not determine every viewer's reading of the scene.

The sequence can produce a troubling split between Dani's sense of betrayal and the audience's view of Christian's impaired agency. The film becomes less persuasive if the emotional satisfaction of replacing a bad boyfriend is allowed to swallow that distinction. Its richer ending holds relief and horror together: Dani has found people who will cry with her, and they have demonstrated what they can ask her to accept.

Sources

The owner-supplied JustWatch Seen export confirms viewing. It does not establish approval of the proposed judgment or identify the edition watched.