So much promise destroyed by a total lack of story

Rating: 5/10 (6 August 2019)

It's like a curse with horror films - good trailer, good visuals, a decent first half - and then absolutely no end product. A24 Studios are a prime culprit themselves, having now produced three individual horror films (It Comes At Night, The Witch) that all fail to deliver on expectations past a pleasing aesthetic. Horror has always been an oversaturated genre with very little quality, but this is normally down to a terrible storyline or a plot that has no visual quality to back it up. Arguably, examples such as Midsommar are even worse, when given a budget and platform without a worthy script.
Midsommar follows Dani (Florence Pugh), a deeply disturbed 20-something going on holiday with her boyfriend and his friends to Sweden for a mid-summer festival. Following the death of her sister and parents 6 months earlier (in an intensely disturbing but gripping opening scene), her mental state is vulnerable, leading her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) to resent her somewhat, particularly when she decides to join them on their trip. The opening hour is full of bright visuals, fields in full bloom and some light-hearted traditions; these slowly begin to degrade into slightly more sinister rituals, as the group become fractured through their individual experiences at the festival.
This is where the plot begins to die: Midsommar (just like with so many other horror flicks) commits the cardinal sin of leaving the story to "the audience's interpretation". This is not a clever technique, and only works if the foundations are extraordinarily well-built; otherwise, the production company is solely to blame for lazy writing. Everything falls apart - none of the group question the obviously insane actions of the cult, nor the growing numbers of disappearing people. In the end, you're waiting for the film to end purely to stop wasting your time with pseudo-mysticism.