Director: Ari Aster
Screenplay: Ari Aster
Starring: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, William Jackson Harper, Vilhelm Blomgren, Will Poulter
Running Time: 147 minutes
Genre: Folk horror
New York City: Student Dani Arbor (Pugh) is deeply traumatised after her sister kills herself and their parents. Her trauma puts a further strain on her already collapsing relationship with boyfriend Christian (Reynor). Christian and his friends, Mark (Poulter) and Josh (Harper), are planning a month long trip to Sweden with their Swedish friend Pelle (Blomgren) during which they plan attend a nine-day midsummer festival that is only held every ninety years at Pelle's ancestral commune. When Dani learns about the trip, Christian awkwardly invites her along. When they arrive, the locals seem welcoming and friendly, but as the festivities progress, the rituals and ceremonies become increasingly bizarre and disturbing, and the tourists soon discover the commune's terrifying dark side.
Writer and director Ari Aster made a splash in 2018 with his debut film Hereditary. This is a different style of film. It belongs to a sub-genre of horror known as folk horror, which is mostly set in isolated rural locations and based around folk traditions and beliefs. Here is horror set entirely in beautiful sunlit locations and, unusually for a horror film, it almost all takes place in broad daylight. The story unfolds at a languid pace, but has an ever present disturbing atmosphere that increases as it goes on. It uses a lot of subtle tricks with sound and visuals making it a hallucinatory and often nightmarish experience. Florence Pugh is wonderful in the lead, the other characters don't really have much to do except react to what happens to them, but there are some well-drawn tensions between the others in the group (Mark is extremely gauche and insensitive, Josh believes that Christian wants to copy his thesis and Pelle is in love with Dani). There is also a surprising amount of humour, it is a very funny film. Watching it, I felt constantly off balance and disoriented as it moves from domestic drama to poetic beauty, to crude humour, to disturbing surrealism to flashes of quite shocking gore. I thought this film was really something special.
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