Extremely Disappointing!

Rating: 1/10 (10 July 2019)

From the writer & director who brought you the, ok but slow & boring Hereditary comes this 2.0 version bore of a film which makes that film seem Oscar worthy.
I didn't exactly have high expectations of this film due to the writer & directors previous film, Hereditary being pretty boring & slow. It had the same poor directional, bad cinematography & overall poor editing seen in this film, but it was ok & had some creepy things going on in it. Hereditary at least was a horror film & executed that well throughout, plus it was shorter...
So with that film comes another from the same writer & director, Midsommar. Long story short, the film is about a group of young 20 something's who head off to Sweden & part take in a wicker man like cult.
While I knew this already from the trailers & previews, the film had little else to go on, but you'd expect a film that is 2 hours & 22 minutes to at least have something to go on if not a lot. But the film didn't sadly. The film for 3/4 is basically the group milling about this compound, sleeping, eating, drinking, drug taking, sitting, dancing & part taking in the weird activities this cult have for them. Only 1/4 of the film was horror. It's pretty sad to be honest. I felt the film was way too overloaded with the various activities you saw in the film if not extremely repetitive. The film could've been shorten down by at least 40 minutes tops, saving the rest for either a home release or keep them as deleted scenes. Slow burner or not, this just took the biscuit for pacing & was more frustrating, if not annoying to watch if anything else. Not entertaining.
There would be a lot of scenes which dragged & dragged awkwardly for no reason, even the cut clips themselves in the said scenes. There would even be suspenseful scenes which would take forever in a day to get to the "point" or "pay off" it was "supposedly going to until it would then cut to another scene. Annoying & yet this writer & director claims this is a horror?

The opening was bad too, not very bad, but not very good either. Don't get me wrong it was sinister, but it dragged & you felt it after the 3 minute mark. Even the part after the phone call sequence when Dani discovered her sister had killed herself & their parents via gassing from a gas exhaust from a running car dragged. You'd be sitting there thinking "come on, just get to the point what's happening!?" a lot of scenes did this in the film as I stated above. Not to mention the scenes that did do this cheated you & lead on into nothing. The opening was 12 minutes & 30 seconds long. You get over the opening at around 5 minutes, but to see title of the film & the opening credits roll after that long seems very tedious if not ridiculous.
The film itself was just filled with a lot of "what the hell!?" moments, even funny ones to be honest. The scenes would either be random, out of place or just badly put together with little to no narrative whatsoever. Not even in the obvious in terms of narrative.
Annoying parts included excessive wailing, crying, yelling & nauseousness. This again has a lot to do with the pacing & poor editing this film had. Even the parts which were suppose to be visually artistic got on your nerves as you just wanted them to get to the point & move on, the film travelled at a snails pace & felt way to over padded. Watching slugs race to even paint dry would be more fun than this. The film didn't even scare me at all, little to no horror. The film was more annoying & bizarre even for its own good to watch. I don't get the entertainment value. There was no plot to speak of & the film simply went nowhere. It fizzled out after the first 40 minutes.
However the acting was good, the gore effects were ok but nothing which in my mind would warrant an 18+ certificate from the BBFC. I seen more gore & violence in this year Superhero Horror Film, Brightburn which was only 15+. Crazy.
The director & writer himself claimed that Hereditary wasn't his first horror, but this film was? What? Ari Aster said that Midsommar was his first (then) going to be his first as Hereditary was just a "family drama" type film. The statement itself couldn't be more pungent in irony as Hereditary was more of a horror than this film would ever be.
Overall the film was flat out terrible & one the worst horror films of 2019 & one of the worst films overfall for this year alone. Ari Aster shouldn't make anymore of these films unless he looks at what went wrong with this one. Critics, cinema snobs & Rotton Tomatoes especially will praise this mess for either biased views on what makes a good horror film alone, to what makes a good film in general. I disliked this film & found it to be disappointing in the extreme. 1/10