Ari Aster has already pulled off one magic trick, going from making Funny or Die videos like “Tino’s Dick Farts” to writing and directing Hereditary, one of the most spellbinding and chilling horror movies in recent memory. Can he do it again? Based on the full-length trailer for A24’s Midsommar: yes, yes he can.
(To be fair, his “fucked up” short films are pretty darn good, too.)
Midsommar follows an American couple, Dani (played by Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor), who travel to a festival in Sweden while their relationship is falling apart. The bathed-in-sunlight summer holiday is meant to do them a world of good, but all that brightness is a surface-level misdirect for what’s really going on in that remote Swedish village. It looks great.
Here’s the official plot summary:
Dani and Christian are a young American couple with a relationship on the brink of falling apart. But after a family tragedy keeps them together, a grieving Dani invites herself to join Christian and his friends on a trip to a once-in-a-lifetime midsummer festival in a remote Swedish village. What begins as a carefree summer holiday in a land of eternal sunlight takes a sinister turn when the insular villagers invite their guests to partake in festivities that render the pastoral paradise increasingly unnerving and viscerally disturbing. From the visionary mind of Ari Aster comes a dread-soaked cinematic fairytale where a world of darkness unfolds in broad daylight.
Midsommar opens on July 3.
