Midsommar (2019)

Like Jordan Peele, Ari Aster is making a name for himself as someone to watch out for in the horror genre. This is Director/Writer Ari Aster's follow up to his well received horror entry, Hereditary in 2018. Midsommar is powerful and often unsettling and violent, but I suspect this one may not be many viewers' cup of tea, although this had again received very positive reviews from critics. For one thing, it moves extremely slowly resulting in its running time of just below two and a half hours. There are many stretches of scenes which are just dialogue and with the camera directed at the actors' face close up, or stretches without dialogue and accompanying music. I actually find this technique very effective and makes the viewing more involving. Of course in order to pull such scenes off you need a good script and performance. Lead actress Florence Pugh may not be a familiar name or face, but she manages to hold her own and gave a very good performance throughout the movie.

The story of Midsommar is outright weird. Weird is not bad, and can be a good thing for a movie because that makes it less predictable. It tells the story of a couple of friends in the USA who were invoted by their Swedish friend to join a mid-summer festival in his home remote village by a pagan community. Midsommar is Swedish for midsummer, hence explaining the way the title is being spelt. The viewer joins in not knowing what they were about to get themselves into. Of course, what starts of like a peaceful, harmonious festival that looks a bit like a hippie cultist gathering, soon turns to something quite different. While many of today's movie watching generation will likely find the slow long drawn and detailed depiction of the various pageantry boring, I thought this style served Midsommar very well as it simply adds on to the creepiness and growing uneasiness that both viewers and characters on screen are going through. It also makes some of the more violent and disturbing scenes even more impactful. It is this form of audience involvement that makes Midsommar stand out as a rather hard to forget tale of horror. October being the month of Halloween is an ideal time for you to watch this if you haven't already.