How I spent my summer vacation

Rating: 4/10 (1 December 2019)

...or, a good way to break up with a crappy boyfriend.
Somewhere there is a good movie to be made of this material (already accomplished by M. Night Shyamalan in "The Villiage," but Sweden is a lovely setting). It's very much like the commercial where the kids decide to hide in the chainsaw shed rather than head for the car with the motor running. But honestly, most films of this genre require a suspension of belief, but if you frame your horror movie in the pretense of academia, I think it's fair for the viewer to expect more than this.
After a long and, I think, pointless prologue, a group of graduate students arrive at a festival in Sweden that's a 4 hour drive from anywhere. It's a little disconcerting that none of the usually annoying need-to-know-more-than-your-colleague seems not to have infected this group. They get on an airplane without a care.... Well, everyone except the lone female in this expedition whose major is psychology not anthropology so we can forgive her for not researching the trip a little more than the rest, plus she's in the throes of grief which really annoys her boyfriend and his buds.
Ari Asher's previous film, "Heredity", was an infinitely more developed and visually compelling film than "Midsommar." And it's curious since there seems to be much more to plumb here. It has the look of something that the producers just gave up on and said, "No more money," like some uninhabited, freshly built stage set. (Where is the kitchen? Where is the bathroom? Where does water come from? Is the puny garden meant to feed all these people? Maybe they live in Stockholm and just come to this location every 90 years to dance around a maypole? I don't know. Answering one or any of these questions would have helped make any of it more believable.)
I walked into this film cold. I'd not seen a preview or read a review. It just looked interesting from the poster. About the only expectation that was fulfilled was from the costumer, the set decorator and the score by The Haxan Cloak...and Florence Pugh who manages the best she can with the material.
The idea of the disabled having magic powers is offensive. And the Swedish Bureau of Tourism and Travel should sue. That was my take-away.