THIS MONTH’S SPOILER TEAM ↓ Midsommar THE PARENTS 1

Ben Travis: The thing that lingered with me most from Hereditary is the sheer dread and emotional trauma that director Ari Aster conjured and in Midsommar, that’s most keenly felt in the opening sequence. It could almost be its own short film, a kind of miniature companion piece to Hereditary where a family implodes from within though this time there’s no supernatural get-out to blame. It’s just sheer human tragedy, shot in a way that creates unbearable anxiety with filmmaking that is utterly calm and considered.

Nick de Semlyen: Midsommar’s been compared endlessly to The Wicker Man, but it actually has more in common with Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, another tale that opens with a heinous family tragedy. Intentionally or not, Aster follows the same template, with a hyper-intense nightmare prologue, expressionistic and near-abstract, in which everything from the music to the visuals is dialled up to an operatic pitch. Here, though, it’s the parents who meet their doom, while the daughter is left behind, bereft. At least nobody’s wearing a red mac.

Top: Dani (Florence Pugh) with Christian (Jack Reynor).

Above: Hmm, something feels not quite right...

2 The Bear 6 The Sex Scene

Ben Travis: The old adage goes that if you introduce a massive grizzly in act one, someone has to be burned alive in its carcass by act three — the unlucky victim here being Jack Reynor’s Christian. It’s a shocking demise, wreathed in symbolism and open to all kinds of interpretations. Bears pop up all over fantasy and fairy tales from the family trio in the story of Goldilocks, to more recent interpretations like the mother bear in Pixar’s Brave

One shows up here before we even get to Sweden John Bauer’s painting ‘Stackars lilla basse!’ (or, ‘Poor little bear!’) is in Dani’s flat, depicting a blonde woman in a crown kissing a giant, hunched bear on the nose.

The Old People

Nick de Semlyen: Jordan Peele, a self-confessed horror junkie, has admitted he found Midsommar to contain “some of the most atrociously disturbing imagery I’ve ever seen on film”. There’s little doubt he was referring to the Mallett’s-Mallet-on-acid sequence in which Aster continues his war on the human head, two people of pensionable age having their craniums systematically mangled in a ritual known as ‘Ättestupa’. It’s a set-piece that’s horrifying, surreal (not least because it takes place in bright daylight), and also weirdly funny — as the kills turn into overkills, the reactions of the onlooking natives remain utterly nonplussed. Yet this isn’t just splatter for splatter’s sake: Aster based the scene on real Swedish folklore (admittedly with embellishments). The lethal hammer used to turn the elders’ noggins into jelly is called a cudgel, and apparently was once used to dispatch elderly Swedish family members when it was felt their time had come. Less IKEA than I-kill-ya.

5 MARK’S DEMISE

Terri White: When Christian, who has been looking for a way to shake Dani off since the start of the film, finally gets his leg over with someone else, it’s the most batshit sex scene you’ve ever seen. He’s seduced, via some kind of hallucinogenic drink, by Maja (Isabelle Grill), who only really wants the sperm of an outsider for an incest-free pregnancy. But they aren’t alone, and while the two get it on, they’re surrounded by a bunch of pagan women, all nude, moaning, pendulous breasts swaying in time. One elderly viewer even puts her hands on his arse to aid completion. It’s a disturbing moment as Christian is ultimately humiliated, used and discarded. Couldn’t we have just been left thinking he was a dick?

7 The Crazy Ending

4 Dani S Surname

Terri White: There is no great subtlety but plenty of sign-posting here: Dani’s family name is Ardor, which is from the Latin for “to burn” which Christian eventually does, while stuffed inside a bear, at Dani’s unhinged direction.

Will Poulter: I thought it wa unique way to go. That deat inspired by an old Viking pra it’s very disturbing. I knew s the moment that Mark goes with the woman who lures h that hut that it was the last you’d see of him before his demise. Until, of course, you see the Mark skin-suit. Because I’d done The Little Stranger, a version of my head already existed in a warehouse outside London. They were able to construct the skin-suit off that. I didn’t try the mask on... a double of my face is the most as a very th is actice, hooting s off him into thing s d

Nick de Semlyen: When relationships burn out, some people set fire to possessions which remind them of their ex. Midsommar takes that concept just that little bit further, with the ex himself being consumed by flames — and while he’s still alive. It’s strong, strong stuff, yet there’s an ambiguity here that seems designed to divide audience sympathies. Some will cheer Dani’s escape from a stifling, toxic relationship, while others, horrified, will boo her as a villain. Considering this scene, even the film’s makers seem conflicted: Aster has said in an interview since that the sequence is Dani “fusing with this community... she’s able to just purge”, while Florence Pugh says she approached it as if Dani has had a mental breakdown and is “someone that’s completely gone now”. Personally I’m somewhere in between, but the fact I can’t stop chewing over this particular cinematic inferno is a mark of its formidable and lingering power.