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Midsommar
Story
Acting
Character Development
Cinematography
Audio
Common
After watching Hereditary, I had high hopes for Ari Aster's Midsummar. Unfortunately, it missed the mark.
Midsommar
Since I’ve been on lock-down, I’ve been watching a variety of new (to me) movies that I wouldn’t normally watch. I watched Hereditary by Ari Aster on Amazon Prime and was very much impressed. So much so that I wanted to consume more of Aster’s work.
Midsummar is also on Amazon Prime so I jumped at the chance to watch it and, quite frankly, I wasn’t impressed. The story was predictable, the characters were unimpressive, and the whole concept was trite and common.
Technically the movie was beautiful. The use of color and cinematography was great and the way it pushed you through the narrative was nice. However, one of the worst sins in film is poor audio and this one just hurt. Yes, the sound QUALITY was great but the peaks and valleys between loud and soft was painful at times.
The story was, as I mentioned, predictable. It starts with a trauma for our main character, Dani (Florence Pugh) and while the whole traumatic scenes was well done and highly detailed, it started our character on a downward spiral. Her tragedy, which was mirrored in some ways in Hereditary, didn’t play an awful lot into the rest of the story but it did start the annoying crying and behavior that I found overbearing.
The character of Dani, while played exceptionally well by Pugh, was just a little too much for me to sympathize with. I understand trauma and tragedy but it’s ramped up to eleven here and I couldn’t relate to her at all. Her sadness came off as annoying and the relationship between her and Christian (Jack Reynor) was irritating.
My critical review of the film, however, may be best summed up by the obnoxiously predictable elements of the story.
FROM HERE ON THERE ARE SPOILERS
