Midsommar

 

 

Florence Pugh (Fighting with My Family) carries the full, freaking weight of Ari Aster's second horrorshow, Midsommar, as a needy grad student whose beau (Jack Reynor) invites her along on a boys' trip to Sweden for an ancient festival of viscera, sacrifice and sex. But who knew? Aster's Hereditary was so unnerving because of its cold clincalility (not unlike the film's infamous dollhouse miniatures), its dispassion, its unaverted gaze at the horrors. Midsommar features the same meticulousness in creation of place and space, in the brutality of the sects rituals and in the simmering animus that alert audience members will sense from the moment the "family" is introduced in its idyllic woodland retreat.