Watch "The Wicker Man" from 1973 instead...

Rating: 1/10 (3 July 2019)

I suspect that reviewers who believe this movie to be the weirdest, most deranged and tripped-out film they've ever seen have not watched many movies. I recommend you watch "The Wicker Man" from 1973, Alejandro Jodorowsky's "The Holy Mountain" and Sergei Parajanov's "The Color of Pomegranates" before you watch this watered down, pretentious murk in order to get a sense of how movies can truly be mind-altering.
The "story" is essentially every cliché of the slasher genre mashed together: a group of young people naively go into the wilderness (Sweden, very scary place lol) and encounter messed up stuff. They each die one by one and, SPOILER ALERT, there is a "final girl" who survives in the end. The rest of this cliché story is fluff. If you think, based on the trailer, that much of this film will mirror the original Wicker Man, you are exactly right. There is even a big fire at the end where a guy gets burned alive.
There is a fine line between homage and rip-off and this may a great example of a film that slips over the edge into complete rip-off territory. I won't even go into all the logical loopholes in the story and the scenario, or point out that none of the customs line up at all with ancient Scandinavian rituals (thus making one wonder why this even takes place in Sweden to begin with, like, why couldn't this be a cult in upstate NY?) because there's no point. The script doesn't even attempt to be deep, the research here is sub-Wikepedia level, and the characters are cookie-cutter types you've seen before in a million other horror movies. One logical question I would ask, however, is how come all of these people are anthropology PhD students going to research Scandinavian paganism but none of them speak Swedish??!?!? Has the writer ever even talked to someone with a PhD???
All this said, Florence Pugh is a talented actress and does a great job with the shallow script. She transcends the material and shows that she can be a powerful dramatic actress. The cinematography is gorgeous too. The editing and sound are pitch perfect. I was especially taken by the set design, the use of furniture and quirky wall paintings to give the film a sense of intricate beauty to contrast with the horror. This is all really fabulous and the people who worked on these aspects of the film should be commended. It is all cosmetic, however. Without the mask of beautiful production and a gifted actress, the director/ writer Aster has absolutely nothing going on here.
"Hereditary" was a very good, solid horror film and I wonder if Aster didn't rush into this sophomore effort too soon. This seems like a script he could have banged out in a night, especially since it feels like something made out of other films. It also seems that Aster repeats some of the same tricks from "Hereditary"- using shocking, Gaspar Noé-like violence and relying on making his audience feel uncomfortable at the sight of incongruously naked people running around. These stock images are going to get old really fast for him, he needs to work on building up to scares that really pay off.
There will be people who love this director, who are swept away by the cool style and photography of this film or who have simply never seen any of the hundreds of other movies out there with strange imagery and creepy paganism, and these people are going to think this movie is a mind-blower. That's nice, but please watch "The Wicker Man" from 1973 first before you fall in love with this dumpster fire.