A pain in the Aster.

Rating: 4/10 (9 July 2019)

'Midsommar' starts out fairly well with an undeniably disturbing scene that acts as an interesting setup for both the characters and what would seem to be the underlying theme of the piece. Unfortunately, it steeply goes downhill once the characters arrive at the festival. Quite frankly, it soon becomes a bore; it's not scary, thrilling, tense, or even dramatic, and any semblance of theme or character is thrown out of the window. The complete lack of any dread, tension, or atmosphere leads you to wonder what the whole point of it is. It doesn't even feel like it's trying to be scary or unnerving at all, aside from the few moments of overt gore that are shown in great detail. This was clearly only done in a desperate attempt to shock the audience, which is kind of a cheap move. Aster even seems to think that foreign customs are enough to unnerve them. The whole piece really tries to evoke a fear of 'the other', which is really quite disrespectful. For example, there are several very long scenes showing the cult do traditional dances and chants, even simply eating meals in the way that they do. They aren't doing anything at all weird or scary here, yet it seems Aster just included them to build a sense of dread. He even includes a disabled character that has absolutely no purpose within the narrative; he only exists as an attempt to 'frighten' the audience. Again, this isn't scary, it's just disrespectful. Another issue is that the characters generally don't feel threatened or in danger at any point, which is really detrimental to the film. If they're not scared, why should we be? Of course, we don't really care about them anyway. In the end, 'Midsommar' is just an extremely overlong collection of uninteresting scenes about uninteresting characters, that has zero atmosphere, dread, or tension. It's not scary, which wouldn't even be so much of a problem if it had an engaging story and good characters, and you leave feeling absolutely nothing, wondering what the whole point of it is. I must say that it is extremely well made, with some interesting shots, great production design and fantastic performances, but when the story is this bad that doesn't really account for anything. It's a real shame, too, as this should be the cure to modern 'jump scare central' horror flicks that flood the screens every month. Aster clearly has the talent behind the camera to craft something unique in the genre, but here he's completely wasted that on an absolutely terrible story with no scares at all. It's just a waste of time really. 4/10