Midsommar is one of the strangest and most formally courageous horror films ever made. It takes everything genre convention demands, night, shadow, confined spaces, jumpscares, and throws it away. This film is almost entirely set in unbroken Swedish summer sunlight. That is the whole point.

Dani (Florence Pugh) has just lost her family in a tragedy. She accompanies her emotionally distant boyfriend Christian and his group of anthropology grad students to a midsummer festival in a remote Swedish commune. The commune is extraordinary: flowers, ritual, communal meals, extraordinary textiles, and something deeply wrong underneath the celebration.

Pugh’s performance is the heart of the film. She is in almost every frame, processing grief in real time, watching her relationship dissolve, finding unexpected community in the rituals around her. The film’s final image, Dani in flower regalia, weeping and then smiling, is one of the most complex emotional moments in recent horror: grief, liberation, horror, and something almost like belonging.

Aster shoots the violence of the film with the same flat, ethnographic clarity as everything else. When people die, it is shown, not cut away from. The lack of editorial protection makes it profoundly unsettling.

The director’s cut (three hours) adds context that enriches the film significantly. But even in its theatrical form, Midsommar is a film that stays with you long after it ends: a slow burn that rewards patience with genuine dread and genuine feeling.