Midsommer is basically a longer, slower, stranger, more graphic, Scandinavian version of The Wicker Man. Only instead of Sgt. Howie looking for a lost girl on an isolated Scottish island, its a bunch of grad students, and one of their girlfriends, journeying to a religious commune in the north of Sweden to study the rituals of their summer festival. Folk horror is a fascinating genera with a pretty slim cannon so I'm always curious to see more however I almost walked out of this movie. There is a sequence very early in the film that is downright offensive. If the creators wanted to establish that this event took place I think they could have done so in a couple of lines of dialogue, I did not think it was necessary to show, and to top that off its only tangentially related to what comes later.
After the initial shocking event the film is a slow burn, which I'm fine with but I think this movie took way much more time then it needed to. The story is well enough structured, the piece has a nice since of foreboding and unease throughout, but the original 1973 Wicker Man film accomplished the heart of what this film does more interestingly, less oppressively, and about an hour quicker. Midsommer is 2 1/2 hours long and its not a pleasant sit. Had I not seen anything of this films type before I'm sure this would have been a very different experience but I've seen better. This movie isn't particularly scary, but it is full of horror, you see a lot of horrible things and I did not get the sense that the film maker really had much interesting to say about them, and if your just going to be SAW with intellectual pretensions I don't see the point. For some far superior cerebral horror of the last few years I would recommend The Witch and Get Out. Midsommer is quite competently made and it has the look right, but I found its substance rather wanting. *1/2
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