Midsommar spoilers throughout
The newest film on my list, but it's rich with talent on both sides of the lens, with moments open to interpretation and easy to criticize if you're not liking it.
It does bring to mind a question though. How would this have played out had everyone simply stayed calm and accepted it. Nothing happens to anybody in the film until they actually make a wrong step. Whether it was attempting to leave, or pissing on a sacred tree, or trying sneak photographs of a sacred text, or simply trying to hide.
1. Possibly related, but my favorite comment about Raiders of the Lost Ark is thinking about how everything would've turned out if Indiana Jones didn't go after the ark. How he fails every step of the way and we regard him as a great hero.
2. Making a wrong step seems inevitable. How many horror films have been made where a bunch of college students who think they know everything tangle with a culture (or supernatural curse) because they see themselves as superior, only to find they're in way over their heads and by being disrespectful they bring about their own doom? So at its core, Midsommar is one of the most typical horror plots ever, but it's told with a high level of intelligence and sophistication.
Another question is, unlike the men in the film who get offed, I don't believe we ever find out what happened to Connie (except a false story about her having been driven to the train station). It's entirely possibly she's being kept alive for child-bearing reasons or something. That's one of the more chilling scenes is when one of the guys is just meandering around a field, and hears a scream (which was so faint I questioned whether I heard it myself, but I'm pretty sure I did.
I've seen (and we've all experienced) many filmmakers who are worried they are being too vague and that their audiences won't get what they're doing, so they explain too much. This is Ari Aster's 2nd feature and he's confident that he's giving us just enough to unnerve us by what we're not having explained.
Seems odd that the plan would be to bring so many people just to kill the majority of them. So I imagine in theory they all could have lived, had they all been agreeable to the events.
Yes. This is what sets it apart from The Wicker Man, which is about a bunch of pagans
searching for a blood sacrifice. What the townfolk are doing isn't a trap and isn't evil when viewed from their cultural perspective. Some parts of Japan had a way of dealing with the elderly that's as cruel as what happens here. That scene here, the first real bit of hide-your-eyes horror, is so unnerving because the Americans are as shaken as we would be, while the townfolk just go about it in the calm manner of an a ancient custom.