Critics Say ‘Midsommar’, The New Film From The Director Of ‘Hereditary’, Will “F*** Y’all Up”
Sounds good!
Last year, a little film called Hereditary unleashed a wave of psychic trauma on a veritable army of moviegoers. This year, Midsommar, a new film from Hereditary‘s director Ari Aster, looks primed to do the exact same thing.
Midsommar stars rising talent Florence Pugh, best known for her work as the acidic title role in Lady Macbeth and playing wrestler Paige in Stephen Merchant’s Fighting With My Family.
In the film’s prologue, Pugh suffers some kind of tragedy — the trailers are vague on the exact nature of the horror, just as Hereditary‘s trailers disguised the trauma that kicks that film’s plot off. Thus, her boyfriend, who had been secretly planning to break-up with her, is forced instead to take her on holiday to Sweden, where a run-in with a solstice festival puts them all in serious danger.
Basically, it sounds like the world’s most agonizing end of a relationship movie — and, unsurprisingly, critics reckon it will fuck you right up.
The film was played to audiences for the very first time at a screening event in the States last night. According to Aster, the movie has actually only just been finished — so consider the showing a very early sneak peek.
Midsommar Will Melt Your Brain
But hey. early or not, critics came out of the film equal parts appalled and inspired. Jacob Knight of Birth.Movies.Death called it “incredible”, and described it as the “most nihilistic psych rock break up record ever written” while his fellow BMD scribe Scott Wampler kept things simple, and promised that the film is “gonna fuck y’all up.”
Hahaha. #Midsommar gonna fuck y’all up.
— Scott Wampler™ (@ScottWamplerBMD) June 19, 2019
MIDSOMMAR is incredible. The most nihilistic psych rock break up record ever written. I felt queasy throughout the whole damn thing.
— Jacob Knight (@JacobQKnight) June 19, 2019
Going longer in his review, Wampler described the film as a “break-up melodrama tossed in a blender with the folk horror sub-genre” while describing its second half as “surreal in an unpredictable way, and some of the kills are admirably nasty.”
The Swedish Chainsaw Massacre
Despite the film’s folky setting, the key reference point many critics have seized on is, oddly enough, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Phil Nobile Jr., the editor of horror mag Fangoria, is particularly convinced by the connections, saying both films are “nightmare fairytales.”
I’ll qualify this by saying not necessarily in terms of quality or impact, but #MIDSOMMAR possesses the same nightmare fairy tale DNA of TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, and some surprisingly specific visual and narrative echoes of that earlier film occur throughout. https://t.co/z10KY6FXlB
— Phil Nobile Jr. (@PhilNobileJr) June 19, 2019
Certainly, Midsommar sounds as mind-melting as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with critic Charles Bramesco telling Aster fans that he’s going to be “picking bits of this thing out of my teeth for weeks.”
MIDSOMMAR: Ari Aster’s LATE REGISTRATION. Faded T-shirt coloration, glistening viscera, visual distension, cringe comedy, all by way of Ken Russell. I’m gonna be picking bits of this thing out of my teeth for weeks.
— Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevasse) June 19, 2019
But that’s not just to say that the film is nothing but a gruelling, unpleasant slog. Strangely enough, many who have seen the film have described it as unexpectedly funny — Vanity Fair‘s Richard Lawson spends much of his glowing review praising its comedic chops, while acknowledging that it is “as much a musing on the absurdity of our fragility as it is a scared lament.”
Basically, sounds like this thing is going to have your brain slopping out of your ears. Guess we’ll find out when Midsommar hits Australian cinemas on August 8, a full month after the Americans get it, because the cinematic distribution system in this country is fundamentally broken.