As you brace yourself for Ari Aster’s Midsommar, you wonder: Will it be another experience of harrowing catharsis, like Aster’s debut outing, Hereditary? The film’s opening scenes—coldly lit and scored with humming strings and animalistic howls of grief—seem to confirm it. When we meet college student Dani (Florence Pugh), she’s isolated, enduring a nerve-shredding family crisis behind a mask of feminine selflessness and apparently afraid to reveal her emotions to her distant and manipulative boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), even after her worst fears come true. And all this happens before the opening credits.
But once an affection-starved Dani, along with Christian and his bros, follow their friend Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) to his cultish village in rural Sweden for a mysterious pagan festival, Midsommar blossoms into a flower of a different color.
