The filmmaker fidgets with that peculiar breathlessness once again throughout Midsommar, a terrifically juicy, apocalyptic cinematic sacrament that dances around a fruitless relationship in dizzying circles. We are not stuffed inside a cavernous house of horrors this time around. But be prepared to feel equally suffocated by a ravenous family (albeit, a chosen, cultish kind) all the same. In the midst of wide-open pastoral surroundings we may be, but Aster still wants us to crave and kick for oxygen, perhaps in a less claustrophobic and more agoraphobic fashion. The tangible dread in Midsommaroftentimes alleviated by welcome flashes of comedy, always charged by tight choreography and Pogorzelskis atmospheric compositionsis so recognizably out of Hereditary that you'll immediately distinguish the connective headspace responsible for both tales.

And yet, this superb psychedelic thriller sowed somewhere amid an outdoorsy mother!, a blindingly lit Dogville and fine, a contemporary The Wicker Man, is different by way of Asters loosened thematic restraint. You wont exactly feel lost while disemboweling Asters inviting beast, but you can certainly argue that the sun never sets on the films cosmically vast subject matter: reaping notions of (white) male privilege, American entitlement (that literally pisses on whats not theirs) and most prominently, female empowerment. And this is also a fitting way to describe the location where most of the story unfolds, under nearly 24-hour sun. We are in a remote, hidden-from-view Swedish village nested somewhere in Hlsingland, among tranquilly dressed Harga folk who celebrate summer through initially quaint, but increasingly bizarre and downright petrifying rituals. There is only a slack sense of yesterday and tomorrow in Asters locale of choice where an endless string of hallucinatory traditions are exercised in broad daylight.

The folkloric practices start off appealingly enougha misleading gust of peace (superbly countered by The Haxan Cloaks skin-crawling score) breezes in the air while heady drugs dissolve in tempting cups of tea. But how did we even get here and find ourselves among these hippy-dippy proceedings cloaked in white linen? Well, we followed Florence Pugh, Asters second fearless female lead after Toni Collette,playing a grieving character marked by something unspeakable. In a deeply scarred, emotionally unrestricted performanceyou might hear her screams in your nightmaresPugh plays Dani, a graduate student aiming to put some distance between herself and an extreme case of trauma involving her bipolar sister. (A stunning prologue unravels the details of the tragic ordeal with top-shelf narrative economy.) And Dani isnt on her own. In fact, she embarks upon the picturesque Scandinavian adventure as an outsider at first, tagging along some fellow scholars of academia, a group that includes her self-absorbed longtime boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor, convincingly egotistical). Also in the clan are Christians buddies Josh (William Jackson Harper)headed to the festivities for academic researchthe blabber-mouthed Mark (Will Poulter, so hysterically douchey that he earns the jesters cap hed wear later on), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), the brainchild of the operation as well as a member of the makeshift family that would host the group.

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Midsommar movie review & film summary (2019) | Roger Ebert