*Obviously

I do not know if I fully talked about it on this blog, maybe a little in my review of Us but I am not a fan of most horror movies. Mostly because I find the jump scares to be lazy writing and most of the characters just continuously make horrendous decisions in order to keep the story moving. I also extremely dislike Cult movies because its just creepy to imagine people like that. So this Cult horror movie really was not something I was looking forward to seeing, to say the least. But I powered through like a boss and came out on the other side (congrats to me). I did walk out however looking like this…

Because WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST WATCH?!?!?! I mean I literally went home after this and just googled “someone please explain Midsommar to me.” Ari Aster, in his follow up to Hereditary, created a world and a community where people have specific rules that they have been following for hundreds of years. That concept actually fascinates me to be honest, what doesn’t fascinate me is people jumping off cliffs for no reason, and skinning peoples faces.

Midsommar is about a group of friends who take a week long vacation to their Swedish Friends farm for a festival (already sketchy). Then once the festival starts and things immediately start going crazy, the group all starts to veer toward a dark path. And again I will make this absolutely clear, if you walk to a field and this is your entrance, LEAVE RIGHT THEN AND NEVER COME BACK.

As a fan of movies I like to put myself in the position of the characters to try and see if I would react the same way. This movie really challenged that theory for me because most of the time I would have done the exact opposite of everything the characters did. As I said above I would have been out of there from the get go, but there are other plot lines in this that just baffled me a little bit and felt shoe horned in to keep the plot moving.

The main thing that struck me in this was Aster’s directing ability and the acting of pretty much everyone involved. Horror movies really do not work if the actors are not bought in 100% and all the characters definitely were dialed in for this.

Stock Watch

Stock Up – Florence Pugh is someone I was introduced to in the surprisingly great Fighting with My Family. I said in that movie, that you could not take your eyes off her because she was that captivating. I echo that sentiment here as there is just someone about her and I think she is basically the British version of Chloe Grace Moretz (I think they will compete for roles just like my guys Taron Egerton and Zac Efron). She gave a stunning performance in a really grief stricken role, and I continue to be very impressed by her. Others have taken notice as well as she got her Marvel role as well.

Stock Up – Ari Aster is clearly a talented filmmaker and looks like someone who will be making movies for a long time. He had so many incredible shots in this that it kept changing your perspective on difference scenes. I was thoroughly impressed with his ability, because I felt the movie was made significantly better not by the story but by the overall production.

Stock Down – Will Poulter played the bad kid in the Maze Runner series, and he seems to be getting type cast into that role. He is not necessarily a bad person in this, his acting was just a little over the top and I just was not into it.

*A couple other tidbits

• The music in this movie was insane and was one of my favorite scores of the year so far.
• This movie was unexpectedly brutal at times.
• Even though the sex scene was hard to watch I cannot deny it was incredibly powerful.

What an interesting movie to see and discuss, and again sticks with my theme of original movies. I will say it again if you are someone who complains about reboot and super hero culture, seek these movies out because they are well made.

Juice Rating:

*You can find all of my Movie Ratings here.