Midsommar - DVD, BLURAY, Digital

I enjoyed this film & recommend it. It was a unique & well done "horror film" without using the same old cliche horror-film-recipe over & over again. Honestly, I do not understand why everyone finds this film so "unsettling" and so "creepy." If people would just pick up a book & seek out knowledge once in awhile, you would see that this film was a good horror film with a nod to the Norse histories & legends. It was a fine portrayal of ancient culture & ritual lost to time (or so we so arrogantly think, stuck in our technological wasteland where humanity & analytical thinking is all but lost to the digital hive mentality) with a horror film twist.I thought the film was well put together & unfolded the plot gradually so as not to spoil what was to come. You could tell shortly after they arrive in the commune that things were not quite right, despite all of the smiles & beautiful welcoming faces. All throughout, Aster & Andersson did a wonderful job pitting the beauty & light of the site against the harsh & dark reality of what lies beneath.I thought Ari Aster did a brilliant job staging & slowing unfolding this dichotomy of the sunny & bright look of the Harga commune & people-the vision & overall look of the film-versus the dark undercurrent the secrets they held.It started almost immediately with the first ceremony - the Attestupa. I thought the visitors were extremely rude & uncouth in their overdone reactions to it. If people in that culture end their lives at a certain age, what is it to you? You would certainly expect a much more mature reaction from supposed anthropology students. Josh, to his credit, seemed to know right away what Pelle meant & was therefore very calm, albeit somewhat horrified to see it live & up close in his face. I appreciated his approach.Their community was fine with it & that was their way. Modern Westerners-especially here in America-have a huge arrogance & naivete that everywhere in the world will follow the American system of values, law, and thinking. Even in movies like "Hostel" you saw that same attitude from characters which, ultimately, gets them killed. Again, in "Midsommar," they held that attitude that anything not American or modern Western is bad/weird etc...and did not even try to acclimate to where they were staying. Would I throw myself off a cliff at 72 if I was otherwise healthy with good quality of life? No. But do I care if they choose to? No. Now if they came to America and started doing it then, sure, you can say something.After that event, the cast of characters branch off into their own reactions & experiences at Harga-Mark was just an uncouth bull in a china shop with no respect for anything outside his parochial American existence. Josh was well-read on the Norse/Harga traditions so he was more exploring fact vs. fiction for his paper. Dani was at first upset but then seemed almost numbed & even seemed to be comforted strangely. She took the experiences as they came. Christian did not seem to care at all-he gave her the usual patronizing "are you okay" type thing but even Dani was beginning to see him for what he was.As the film paces on, you see a secondary contrasting plot of how Christian continues to disgust Dani and build resentment/contempt in her as she realizes more & more that he is more patronizing & pity rather than love & affection...as Pelle asked her - "do you feel held by Christian?" - the answer was overwhemingly obviously NO.So, I liked how the film unravels its main plot of slowly having the cast & the viewer "discover" what Harga is all about, parallel to this plot of Dani "discovering" what Christian is all about...all while beginning to embrace the Harga community as a new adoptive family and moving away from her American counterparts.I won't spoil the ending of casts' diferent fates but I will say that I enjoyed the movie and that I recommended it to family & friends.It was a beautiful looking film-the way Aster & Andersson staged the different shots-even when something gruesome was occurring, you didn't know whether to look at the gore or enjoy the lovely scenery.The jewel case that this particular copy of DVD came in isn't bad or too cheap (thankfully it was not like the ones with a plastic X & empty space so you can just poke thru the paper into the disc) but I always swap it out for a better one that I bought myself. Plastic was a little weak for my liking. But it was well worth the price of $8.99.

Trippy, arty, creepy, surreal horror film not like anything I have seen before. It was unsettling in a way a more “typical” one set in a fog-shrouded town deep in the mountains or in haunted house during a thunderstorm, as those are areas where one expects to find unsettling, horrifying, or scary things. To me the film differed in that it was such a strange, new, alien environment for those caught up in it, that on the surface it seemed light and fun and sunny and idyllic but after a while the protagonists (or at least the viewer) realizes how alien the environment they are in is (despite initial appearances) and how isolated they are by distance, language, and basic viewpoints of the world.The film centers on Dani Ardor (played by Florence Pugh), her boyfriend Christian (played by Jack Reynor), and their group of friends (really Christian’s friends; they at best tolerate Dani). Dani we learn, already in a somewhat loveless, needy relationship with Christian (who feels Dani is a draining presence but is too nice and does care about her some so doesn’t dump her, despite the urging of Christian’s friends), hit rock bottom early on in the film when several members of her family are killed in a murder/suicide. Christian, a good man, doesn’t abandon her but clearly looks trapped, wanting to enjoy life though still wanting to make sure Dani is ok, really more or less doing the bare minimum (and forgetting things like her birthday). It is definitely a situation where Dani likes him more than Christian likes her (though I wonder if it is because Dani needs him, not necessarily loves him).Anyway, one of the group of friends, Pelle, from Sweden, invites Christian and their mutual friends to attend a Swedish folk festival that occurs once every 90 years, at Pelle’s commune, the Harga. The group, a mixture of college students (two of them at least cultural anthropology graduate students) leap at the chance. Christian invites Dani, thinking she will say no, but to Christian’s surprise and the group’s private disappointment, Dani agrees to go to Sweden.At that point all that is Normal and Makes Sense is gone, gone, gone. Starting with the strange camera angles of the group going by car I think the 4 hour drive to the commune after flying to Sweden and almost immediately upon arriving taking psychedelic mushrooms offered them, there is always a twin set of undercurrents; one, can we trust what we see, and two the rules the group knew from back in the United States are gone, though it is a long while before they figure this out. I also think their background as cultural anthropologists work against them, as they are used to observing other cultures and don’t realize yes, this is a strange group, but they are very much in this new reality with this culture they are studying and can very much be affected it, that they aren’t just observers. Maybe it is also a sense of American invulnerability or maybe they are naïve, always assuming basic rules they have internalized at home are going to be followed by a subculture that looks superficially understandable (all white and very Swedish looking, a fair number understand English, their friend Pelle understands the modern world and went to school with them, friendly, lots of attractive women, children playing, etc).As the group’s time with the Harga and the festival unfolds, they slowly (too slowly I think) start to figure out they are living in a Dangerous Cult Commune. Two try to leave (not original members of the group, but two people from London, friends of another man returning to his ancestral commune for the festival) early on and we think they did, kind of; they certainly don’t rejoin the group. The viewer probably thinks “oh no, they are dead, definitely dead,” but we don’t see anything to indicate they are killed, though the clues are there that these people can and absolutely would do such a thing (this is true for a while at least); the movie has a lot of foreshadowing and though an unsettling film I will probably never watch again, it would be interesting to view it again to pick out all the foreshadowing.Much of the film’s unsettling nature was for me to realize how strange and alien these people, the Harga, were, though a lot was waiting for the other shoe to drop, that once I realized Dani, Christian, and the others were in grave, mortal peril, what was going to happen next, though again and again Christian and the other friends seemed to have their weird, detached, clinical view of their surroundings, ignoring the great danger they were in (perhaps mirroring Christian’s emotionally distant relationship with Dani?).The last maybe quarter of the movie was horror absolutely. Not subtle, but well-done horror. I don’t want to say too much more other than the basic nature of Dani’s needful, support craving personality and Christian’s emotionally detached, clinical cultural anthropologist personality had a big impact on the fate of the two characters and the final act of the film.I never thought the pacing dragged at all, which is strange as on the surface of it there isn’t a lot of action until the very end and even then it is mostly running. Significant parts of the film are in Swedish, sometimes with subtitles, sometimes not, but this was never a problem and if anything heightened the isolation the American friends felt from the strange cult.The film did get gory at the end and also towards the end there is a good deal of nudity both male and female.