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'Midsommar' Isn't As Good As Everyone Says It Is

         When are we going to talk about the elephant in the room?
You know. The one where Hereditary is a stronger film than Midsommar?
Midsommar has a lot of problems. Let's start with the warning: If you, or the person you are thinking of seeing this film with, is easily triggered by suicide, medication, non-consensual drugging, murder, repetitive noises, loud and repetitive screaming, or if either of you has anxiety, this is not the film for you. I wish, as an anxiety sensitive person myself, that someone would have told me this. The movie physically left me drained and stressed out of my mind.
          The movie is over two hours long, and yes, you do begin to feel it. There is not enough storyline to fill in a mild horror film with empty characters and an over two hour run time. Nothing (by horror standards) truly happens in the film until well over an hour into the film. In fact, the last twenty minutes have the most traffic going on.
          While the stellar acting performance given by Florence Pugh (she plays Dani) helps get you through a lot of the unbearable nothingness of pretty cinematography and forced but unexplained symbolism, its not enough to save this film. Ari Aster has made a perfectly pretentious, "high art", shouldnt-be-considered-horror film. Is it disturbing? Yes. Is is scary? Not at all. The scariest thing about this film is how alike and basically plagiarized it is from the 1973 film The Wicker Man.
From the pagan rituals, outsiders being lured in to a society they dont understand, men being burned alive in strange structures built by said crazy people, strange sexual similarities, women singing in unknown languages, women dancing around a maypole and people walking around in strangely similar costumes made themselves to celebrate yes, the same concept of a may queen...its nothing close to unique.
Care to disagree?

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