How to make flowers and sunlight scary

Rating: 8/10 (15 August 2019)

Midsommar is a very atypical horror film, at least in presentation. The plot is not entirely unique, about outsiders stumbling into a small village run by a cult (reminiscent of other folk horror films like The Wicker Man) but the way it's filmed is incredible. Ari Aster has done something very special, mixing beauty with horror in a seamless fashion.
The plot goes like this, a college student named Dani suffers a massive trauma due to the sudden death of the rest of her family. The next year, her boyfriend and his friends are planning on going to a remote village in Northern Sweden to observe and study the village's strange midsummer festival. Dani wants to tag along too, wanting to escape from her life and trauma for a little while, but when they arrive, they get more than they bargained for, as the town's festivals prove to be much more strange and horrific than originally anticipated.
The film has a lot in common with Aster's previous film Hereditary, in that it explores themes of death, trauma and family connections, as well as the occult. However, Midsommar takes a very different angle to the concept, both in presentation and in plot. While Hereditary did have a great story, and did veer off the beaten path that is horror, it is still a fairly typical horror film in other ways, especially that film's climax, which very much fits in with more mainstream horror films like the Conjuring. Midsommar, however, avoids typical horror tropes for the most part, as the film is set almost entirely during the daylight hours (which makes sense, since in Northern Sweden, midsummer days stretch on for hours, while the nights are incredibly short), so hiding things in the dark of the night proves to be much harder when there's sunlight for most of the day. Aster solves this with the use of visual effects simulating the feeling of being on a bad drug trip, shockingly vivid portrayals of gore and death (that at the same time isn't too gratuitous like the Saw films) and the strange perplexing customs of the cult village that gives both the American main characters, and the audience, a growing sense of unease and dread.
I don't want to spoil the ending, beyond saying that things don't go well for the tourists, but there was a certain level of ambiguity in how the story ends, similar to the ending of Hereditary. It's obvious that there's plenty of things to analyze and interpret on a rewatch, and it's a film that's ripe for Youtube channels to dig through and analyse frame by frame.
While I wouldn't say I liked it as much as Hereditary, Midsommar is a wholly unique horror film that deviates a little from horror norms and expectations, to create a surreal and uneasy horror experience.