Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's not a horror movie. It's a grief movie. If you had a Venn diagram of the people who gave one stars to this film and "The Witch," the circles would overlap. They most likely entered the theater thinking they'd see a conventional horror movie. They were wrong. ___________________________ SPOILERS FOLLOW What this film has in common with Aster's earlier "Hereditary" is that both are thoughtful, often painful, meditations on the nature of grief. When Dani Ardor's sister kills both their parents and herself at the start of the movie, Dani is wrenched into a grief so profound she clings to anything, even her indifferent and emotionally shallow boyfriend, to lend her even a brief illusion of stability. When he and his bro-friends decide to take a trip to Sweden (at least nominally to perform anthropological research), the boyfriend halfheartedly invites Dani. When she accepts, he's backed into a corner, committed to taking her even though their relationship is over in all but name. That's the setup. Immediately distinctive about this setting (mostly filmed in Hungary) is its beauty. Stunningly sunlit throughout, with blonde, white-clad Swedes in lovely tunics frolicking over flower-filled fields of emerald green, the film looks like no other-- and proves that you don't need darkness, lousy flashlights, or storms to create an atmosphere of alienation and dread. Because let's face it -- this is weird in a freaky Stepfordian kind of way, the alienation made more alienating by the fact that we're provided with Swedish subtitles only part of the time. Like Dani and the bros, we don't really feel as if we're part of this culture, this Midsommar festival to which we have been (less reluctantly) invited. In an early scene, her defenses lowered by mushroom tea, Dani sees the grass growing up through her hand. It's startling as an image of fruitful growth, yes, but it's also a reminder of our own death. Her grief overwhelms her, and she leaves the group to collapse near the forest, her grief suppressed only until she can let it out by herself in an anguished wail, unregarded by anyone and wholly alone and bereft. By the end of the movie, things are different. Dani's last wail is one shared by the community. As she sees a pivotal event I don't want to spoil, the last tether holding her to that previous life is really severed, and her response is to be blown away by that tide of grief. But this time, it's collective. Surrounded by the women of the community, who echo and share her cries, Dani, for the first time, is not alone in her grief. It is shared. Supported. Echoed. Validated. I suspect that this is also why many viewers didn't necessary get the ending of the film, particularly Dani's decision and her facial expression in the film's last frame. Like the ending of "The Witch," this is a moment which seemed to mark an absolute nadir for a character, the worst thing that can happen--only for that character to discover a previously undiscovered wellspring of power and community that in the case of "The Witch" literally lifts them up. In between those two points, it's fun to see how this film plays with horror tropes, particularly the low-key picking-off of the bro club as if they were Camp Crystal Lake counselors, but what's far more in the forefront is the atmosphere of beautiful and otherworldly dread. It's a slow-build horror film, if it's a horror film at all, and mostly I would argue it is not, any more than "The Wicker Man" was, or "Jacob's Ladder" was. Or if it is, it's rewriting the genre. I'm more than cool with that.