Ari Aster does it again!

Rating: 8/10 (12 August 2019)

Ari Asters new film Midsommar is pretty good! It doesn't rival Hereditary, but it's still a really really good film.
As to be expected from Aster, the cinematography was absolutely stunning, with some very beautiful shots and purposeful framing. Aster is someone who knows exactly what he wants in the frame and when to use a wide. It was also really good to see the effects stepped up in this film, especially when it came to depicting people under the effects of psilocybin. I can tell you from first hand experience that the way Aster depicted the visual trips of people on mushrooms is incredibly accurate.
This film also has a pretty great sense of humour too, with Will Poulters character being the main comedic relief (although thankfully not overbearing). Aster, once again, is able to capture the true essence of grief and suffering of people so perfectly... With the very beginning of the film being very full on with the depictions of bipolar. Florence Pugh does an amazing job of portraying a character going through a lot of grief, and relationship dynamic between her and her boy friend was really well done and felt very believable. I think the biggest strength of this film would definitely be the build up and symbolism, but the actual pay off as to what it ended up being wasn't the greatest? That's not necessarily a bad thing, but after coming off the masterful Hereditary and what that film ended up being, this film did feel a bit directionless at points and definitely dragged. Where as in Hereditary, every single conversation and character interaction was all setting things in motion for the ending.
Midsommar is only 10 or so minutes longer than Hereditary but feels much longer compared to Hereditary. Hereditary also toes a very fine line of mainstream horror versus arthouse horror, where as Midsommar is just absolutely insane and unintentionally hilarious at certain points. If you thought Hereditary was weird, this film is very very surrealist.
The gore effects in this film ranges from terrifyingly accurate to... Kinda bad? There's some really awesome uncanny valley imagery used at certain points, but *spoilers* the scene involving the cliff suicide, Aster probably should've cut away instead of showing them hitting the rock, cause that looked really fake. *end spoilers*.
Another flaw was the choices in subtitling. At first I thought Aster was intentionally not subtitling the Swedish parts to put us into the perspective of the Americans being really confused, which I, at first, thought was a really clever thing to do, to put the audience into the perspective of the Americans, but then he just ended up subtitling it.. Which made me wonder why they didn't just have subtitles for the entire movie.
One other minor nitpick would be the scene where Florences character is crying in a plane toilet, and I'm just like "plane toilets aren't that spacious..."
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this film and will definitely be checking out all things Aster directs from here on out. I originally gave this film a 7, but it's looking to be more of an 8 for me. This is the third best film of the year so far, with Parasite being my current favourite and Under The Silver Lake being my 2nd.