Movie Review: Midsommar
(One blog post every half year isn't too shabby, is it?)
(Thanks, DALL-E.)
A better-than-expected movie.
I did not like the premise (a cult kills young adults), mostly because I’m not a huge horror movie fan. If the plot was played for laughs (e.g. Scary Movie) I would have looked forward to it more.
But Midsommar rapidly grew on me because it handles Swedishness well.1 The cultists aren’t just evil people whose cover is being Swedish; they’re evil in (stereotypically) Swedish ways.
If you had asked me, “what’s a stereotypical bad thing that a Swede might do to an old person”, I would have said “It’s probably a myth but [ROT-13 spoiler] gurl’q guebj gurz bss n pyvss2”, and that’s just what happened. If you are Swedish and watching this with non-Swedes, you may enjoy being able to predict this to your friends a few minutes in advance.
If you and your movie-watching friends have no association with Sweden at all, I can’t promise you’ll like the movie. Also, since you don’t know much about Sweden, please do not think Swedes are murderous cultists. We are nothing like that.
(Except for when the cultists force the protagonist to eat a disgusting-looking fish. Normal Swedes also do this to people. We mean well.)
Footnotes:
Not perfectly. The protagonists want to visit Stockholm but decide there’s no time. Why? Well, they are flying into Arlanda and traveling north to their friend’s (really enemy’s) village (really a cult), but Stockholm is south of Arlanda.
True, but Stockholm is 20 minutes south by train. They couldn’t have done a day trip?
But this is just me nitpicking because I think precision is important.
This is a ROT-13 reference: uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/%P3%84ggrfghcn
When this happened, the gore looked fake. But I am not a medical professional and have not seen the inside of a body, so it’s possible even real gore looks fake to me.
Other special effects are minimal but done well.