'Midsommar' Is Unlike Any Movie You've Experienced, Hauntingly Good and Terrifyingly Addictive

‘Midsommar’ Is Unlike Any Movie You’ve Experienced, Hauntingly Good and Terrifyingly Addictive

January 17, 2020

More than any year in recent memory, 2019 was filled with a series of great horror movies. Although movies such as Us, Crawl, and Ready or Not were all great horror stories in their own respects, there’s no more affecting horror movie last year than that of Midsommar. The film follows a group of friends who travel to Sweden for a festival that only happens ever ninety years. Naturally, the festival has more devious underpinnings and our heroes find themselves ensnared in the grips of a pagan cult.

Midsommar serves as the sophomore effort of writer-director Ari Aster, who broke onto the horror scene with 2018’s Hereditary. What makes Aster’s latest film so unique is that it’s a horror movie set almost entirely in broad daylight. Even though the filmmaker describes it as “a breakup movie dressed in the clothes of a folk horror film,” there’s something both hauntingly good and terrifyingly addictive about the movie. In many ways, Midsommar is the type of film that you want to end as soon as possible but is mesmerizing enough to keep you glued to the screen throughout the 2 1/2 hour runtime.

A large part of the reason why Midsommar is so unnerving is due to the astounding, incredible leading performance from Florence Pugh. Although Pugh also had equally great performances in Fighting With My Family and Little Women, Midsommar is easily her most committed performance to date. And what a daring and audacious performance it is. Aside from Pugh’s work here, the element of the movie that sticks with you the most is how deeply unforgettable most of the imagery in it is. In case you forgot how deceptively unnerving Midsommar is on a visual level, here are some GIFs to remind you of this fact.