Midsommar has its own obscene Looney Tunes moment. It happens near the midpoint of the movie, when the characters who serve as the film’s nominal heroes—a group of U.S. grad students who’ve decamped to Hälsingland in Sweden to attend a secretive summer solstice festival—observe a ceremony centered on the village’s two oldest inhabitants, who greet their peers from the top of a dizzyingly tall stone cliff. No spoilers, unless you consider Newton’s laws of gravity to be a spoiler: The scene’s inevitable trajectory generates a uniquely deadpan sort of dread, perversely literalizing the idea of a “jump scare,” while all but daring us to look away. What’s funny is the contrast between the Americans’ immediate, visceral revulsion and their hosts’ nonplussed good humor. In addition to skewering the concept of politically correct cultural relativism—a liberal mind-set somewhere in between “when in Rome” and “live and let die”—Aster is dropping the gauntlet so hard that it squooshes all over the place and in our faces.
Synopsis: Several friends travel to Sweden to study as anthropologists a summer festival that is held every ninety years in the remote hometown of one of them. What begins as a dream vacation in a place where the sun never sets, gradually turns into a dark nightmare as the mysterious inhabitants invite them to participate in their disturbing festive activities.