Musty TV's Maniacal Halloween Countdown - Day 19

I can't believe I forgot to pack my Claritin

Last Saturday I watched Midsommar and....I'm still trying to figure out my feelings about it.

I should say, I watched it twice. Kind of. I put the movie on after a party, while I was still kind of drunk, and pretty tired, and ended up sleeping through most of it, waking up maybe every 20 minutes, not knowing what the hell was happening. The next morning I watched it in full, but with a weird sense of deja vu, like my mind had absorbed some of it in my sleep. And I'd say that added sense of eerie isn't something the movie actually needs. It's pretty fucked up the way it is.

I wasn't the biggest fan of director Ari Aster's first film Hereditary (you can read my review here), and in many ways Midsommar is the same movie. It also deals with grief, family, mental illness, and the occult. But Aster commits to that final bit harder and better than he did in Hereditary, though to say much more would lead into spoilerville, and not knowing where Midsommar ends up it is the only way you should enter into it.

(Though if anyone would like to have a spoiler-filled discussion in the comments, I'd gladly accept because I have so many questions about the whole set up. Like...if they only do it every 90 years, what are they doing in between?  Do they actually live there all the time? Not all of them do, obviously, because those Swedish college students don't. So, what's the benefit of it all??? What are they getting in return? SO MANY QUESTIONS.)

I will also say (warn?) that it has some truly, truly, shocking death scenes, and the camera lingers on some really gross gore with a little too much glee, and its almost two-and-a-half hour running time is a tad on the indulgent side.

But I also can't stop thinking about it, and I haven't seen a horror movie this year that left me so conflicted. Did I love it? Did I hate it? Maybe both? So I think I'll have to watch it again, NOT in my sleep, perhaps when the even more indulgent three hour director's cut makes it to Apple TV in November.  For now, the theatrical version is currently streaming on most services.