Ari Aster’s Midsommar runs 147 minutes, and for most of them the sun does not set. That is the film’s central trick. Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) arrive in rural Sweden as tourists and leave as something else, and Aster never lets the audience look away from what the Hårga do in the daylight.
Trailer, via A24.
The Hårga and the Once-in-90-Years Festival
Midsommar is a 2019 folk horror film written and directed by Aster, a co-production between the United States and Sweden. Christian and his friends Mark and Josh are invited by their Swedish friend Pelle to a nine-day midsummer festival at his ancestral commune, the Hårga, in the Hälsingland region. The festival happens once every 90 years. Josh, writing his thesis on European midsummer festivities, calls it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Christian meant to break up with Dani, still grieving after her sister Terri killed their parents and herself by carbon monoxide poisoning. He invites her instead. That decision is the whole movie.
What the Commune Does in Daylight
The group meets Simon and Connie, a British couple invited by Pelle’s commune-brother Ingemar. Ingemar offers psychedelic mushrooms. Dani has a bad trip and hallucinates about her dead family.
The next day, the visitors watch an ättestupa: two elders jump from a cliff onto the rocks below. One survives. The commune members mimic his wails of pain, then crush his head with a mallet. Elder Siv tells Connie and Simon that every member does this at 72.
Aster builds horror without darkness. The violence is bright, communal, and explained, which makes it worse.
A Breakup Movie Wearing Folk Horror
The finished film grew from a difficult breakup Aster himself went through. The original pitch was a straightforward slasher set among Swedish cultists. Elements of that remain, but the relationship is the engine.
The cast:
- Florence Pugh as Dani
- Jack Reynor as Christian
- William Jackson Harper as Josh
- Will Poulter as Mark
- Vilhelm Blomgren as Pelle
- Ellora Torchia as Connie
- Archie Madekwe as Simon
- Gunnel Fred as Siv
Pugh carries it. Dani’s grief is not decoration; it is the reason she stays when she should run. Pelle tells her he was orphaned after his parents died in a fire, and the commune became his family. He asks whether she feels supported. It is a recruitment pitch dressed as kindness.
Budapest Stands In for Hälsingland
Midsommar was shot mostly on location in the Budapest metropolitan area from July to October 2018. Bobby Krlic, the British electronic musician, composed the soundtrack with Nordic folk music as its base. The film released in the US through A24 on July 3, 2019, and in Sweden through Nordisk Film on July 10. It grossed $48 million.
The runtime is the problem. At 147 minutes, Aster lingers on rituals that repeat what earlier scenes already established. Christian, meanwhile, stays underwritten, so his fate lands as plot rather than judgment. Josh and Mark exist mostly to be removed.
Pugh Is the Reason It Holds
The best thing in Midsommar is its refusal to hide. Most horror needs the dark to work. Aster stages his worst images in full sun, in front of witnesses, with the community watching, and the effect is a film that feels less like a nightmare than a ceremony you agreed to attend.
It is not a clean kill. The middle sags, and the thesis subplot between Josh and Christian never sharpens into anything. But Pugh’s performance holds the center.
What separates Midsommar from the cult thrillers it resembles is that Aster never asks the audience to fear the Hårga. He asks whether Dani’s grief makes their welcome reasonable. The film’s answer is uncomfortable, and it is the one thing here that will outlast the arguments about the runtime.
Midsommar: 7.2 of 10.
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