Midsommar follows Dani, a emotionally devastated young woman who travels to rural Sweden with her detached boyfriend and his friends to attend a rare midsummer celebration. What initially appears to be a picturesque folk festival gradually reveals itself as a deeply disturbing pagan cult with increasingly terrifying intentions. Director Ari Aster crafts a uniquely unsettling horror experience set almost entirely in blinding sunlight, using Dani's emotional trauma as the emotional core of the story.
Aster films a Swedish folk festival in daylight as a slow grief processing. The horror is therapeutic; the boyfriend is the patient. The film's daylight does the work of darkness.
A grieving woman finds a Swedish commune that finally sees her — and that's the horror. Aster stages a cult recruitment as the sunniest nightmare in film.
A Swedish commune welcomes grieving outsiders into a sun-drenched festival with open arms and a fixed schedule of death. The warmest cult recruitment ever filmed.
