Midsommar (2019) is the film that took everything horror cinema relies on and threw it into full sunlight. No darkness. No jump scares hiding in shadows. No flickering lights in a basement corridor. Ari Aster's second feature sets its worst images under a wide, relentless Swedish sky, and the effect is suffocating in a way that genuinely few horror films manage. This Midsommar (2019) movie review will try to explain why it works so well, and why the discomfort it produces doesn't fade when the credits roll.
What Midsommar is actually about
On the surface, Midsommar follows Dani (Florence Pugh) and her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) as they travel to a remote Swedish commune called Hårga to witness a midsummer festival that takes place once every 90 years. Dani joins the trip after a family tragedy leaves her shattered, still raw, still leaning on a relationship that has quietly curdled. Christian is checked out. His friends are there for the anthropological novelty and, frankly, the mushrooms. What greets them is a community of linen-clad people who are warm, generous, and meticulous about a set of rituals that escalate from strange to horrific over the course of the film's 147 minutes.
But the film isn't really about folk horror rituals. It's about grief and the particular cruelty of feeling alone inside a relationship. Dani carries an enormous emotional weight from the opening frames, and Aster constructs the entire film around that weight. The commune at Hårga processes grief communally, loudly, with group wailing and physical participation. The contrast with the cold, private, unshared grief Dani has been managing is the film's actual engine.
Florence Pugh carries everything
There is no version of Midsommar that functions without Florence Pugh. She was 23 during production. The performance she gives belongs to actors twice her age. Dani's opening scene, a phone call that turns into one of the most shattering grief sequences in recent horror, is delivered almost entirely on her face. Pugh does nothing small here. Every moment of humiliation, loneliness, and eventual, complicated release reads as completely real. It's a physical performance as much as an emotional one. She flinches, shakes, breathes wrong, smiles at the wrong time. She makes Dani's arc feel earned rather than schematic, which is the only way the film's final image can land.
Aster's direction: control in every frame
Ari Aster shot Hereditary (2018) as a film about grief becoming something supernatural. Midsommar continues that fixation but strips away every shadow the previous film used as cover. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski keeps the image bright and soft and flat, the way genuine Scandinavian summer light actually looks. Nothing hides. That visual choice is a formal argument: horror doesn't need darkness, it needs wrongness. And Aster is meticulous about making everything look slightly, uncannily wrong well before the violence arrives.
The production design deserves its own sentence. Hårga is covered in painted murals that tell the audience exactly what is coming if they look carefully enough. The community's tapestries, totems, and architectural choices are a language. Aster expects you to read it.
The film's most discussed single image, the cliff ritual witnessed early in the second act, is filmed without cutaways, without music swells, held at a distance that feels like documentary footage. It's the moment the film declares its intentions. After that, the audience knows Midsommar will not blink.
Folk horror and its ancestors
Midsommar sits in a clear lineage. The Wicker Man (1973) is the obvious forebear: an outsider enters a pagan community, the community's rituals accelerate toward sacrifice, the outsider cannot leave. Aster has acknowledged the debt openly. But where Robin Hardy's film builds toward a single devastating revelation, Midsommar telegraphs its ending early and dares you to watch anyway. The horror isn't the surprise. It's the process.
The Witch (2015) belongs in the same conversation. Robert Eggers also strips folk horror to something slow and deliberate and deeply rooted in a community's internal logic. Both films ask you to understand the belief system well enough to feel its gravity, even as it destroys the protagonists. Where Eggers keeps everything cold and Puritan-grey, Aster floods the screen with flowers and colour and beauty. That contrast is part of the horror's mechanism.
The film's relationship with its audience
Midsommar is not a comfortable watch. It runs long by design. Aster wants the disorientation of time passing strangely, the way it does when you're somewhere unfamiliar and slightly altered. The mushroom sequences pull the image in ways that feel genuinely psychedelic without becoming cartoonish. There are scenes that are genuinely hard to watch. The film doesn't apologise for any of it.
It also has a dark, mordant comedy running through it that some viewers miss entirely and others find essential. Christian's friends are drawn as specific, recognisable types: the self-important academic, the pragmatist, the one who just wants to have a good trip. Their fates arrive with a precision that reads as satirical. Midsommar is a horror film, but it's also a very dry breakup film, and those two things coexist without one undermining the other.
In the same way that Hereditary (2018) reframed grief as a supernatural force operating through a family's bloodline, Midsommar uses the commune's rituals as an externalised version of Dani's interior state. By the final act, the film has done something genuinely strange: made the audience complicit in her resolution. You understand why she smiles. You don't quite forgive it. You can't look away.
What it gets right, and what it asks of you
Midsommar is not for everyone. Its pace demands patience. Its violence is graphic and purposeful rather than exciting. Its ending offers a kind of catharsis that isn't clean or comforting. If you go in expecting a conventional horror film, it will frustrate you for about 40 minutes before it does something that makes the whole structure suddenly clear.
Go in knowing it's a film about a woman at the end of her rope finding, in the most wrong possible place, something that feels like belonging. The horror isn't incidental to that story. It is that story.
Few films since have managed the same trick: making the brightest possible image feel like the scariest one. Midsommar is A24's sharpest hour in a genre it has made its own, and Florence Pugh's performance alone puts it in the canon.
Verdict: 9/10. Meticulous, upsetting, and genuinely original. Ari Aster's folk horror study rewards patience with images you won't be able to shake.