Midsommar
Let the festivities begin.
Grieving Dani joins her boyfriend and his friends at a centuries-old summer festival in remote Sweden. Beneath the endless daylight and flower crowns lies a pagan celebration steeped in ritual and worship. As the group is drawn deeper into the community's traditions, the line between festive communion and ritualistic horror blurs with terrifying clarity. What begins as cultural immersion becomes a descent into a world where sunlight offers no refuge and belonging demands a terrible price.
Aster's sunlit inversion of folk-horror—exposing ritual in high-noon daylight rather than forest shadows—rewires the genre's grammar entirely. The clarity becomes its own trap: every fresco, every gesture reads as doctrine rather than mysterious menace. He replaces genealogical inheritance (the through-line of Hereditary) with cultural assimilation as possession, collapsing the boundary between belonging and erasure. The saturated palette and Swedish vernacular architecture double as Dani's emotional architecture—aesthetic choice bleeding into narrative logic in a way few folk-horror films have risked. The film's influence on how visibility itself can amplify dread rather than defang it remains underestimated.
- Original Format
- 35mm (Panavision)
- Aspect Ratio
- 1.85:1
- Original Runtime
- 148 min
- Sound
- Dolby Atmos
- Color Process
- Color
Shot on 35mm by Pawel Pogorzelski. Director's cut at 171 min. Filmed primarily in Budapest, Hungary.
