Gather ’round the maypole to celebrate writer/director Ari Aster’s endless summer with the UNRATED director’s cut of Midsommar, coming this Friday to theaters nationwide. In his highly talked-about and divisive sophomore feature, which takes the viewer on a journey to the bright but deadly fields of Sweden, Aster presents new scenes and extended footage of his (borderline dark-comedy) folk-horror flick!
Synopsis: Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) 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.
As the trailer denotes, a viewing of Midsommar is an experience. The Hereditary (2018) director is helping to bring more clout to the horror genre, pulling Oscar-worthy acting performances out of his casts and penning some deeply disturbing but existential narratives. Not many will be more excited than me to sit through an extended viewing, I stand firmly at the positive end in defense of this polarizing film; the film gains nearly 30 additional minutes on top of its already pretty freaking long theatrical cut, so I expect to be in for a hardy feast of yet more anthropology, mythology, and large-eye-inducing drug scenes that I loved in Midsommar. As luminous in aesthetic as it is dark in content and deeply-seated lore, hopefully a director’s cut of Midsommar will not be too much of a good thing.
Enter into the more fleshed-out world of Ari Aster’s frightening fairytale, Midsommar, by catching the director’s cut in theaters starting Friday, August 30th during its wide re-release.
