Review: Florence Pugh shines in Ari Aster’s remarkable slow-burning horror-comedy

'Midsommar' director Ari Aster is interested in extremities, and knows just when to deploy one to enhance another.

Fun in the sun: Ari Aster’s folk horror flick is a many-splendored—and many-categoried—thing

Horror film is a "Midsommar" nightmare that will either creep you out or drive you out.

Florence Pugh is plunged into a terrifying pagan bacchanal in a magnificent folk-horror tale from Hereditary director Ari Aster

Read the Empire Movie review of Midsommar. A visceral, unique, utterly fucked-up experience that demands to be seen on the big screen,...

Ari Aster's follow-up to 'Hereditary' is a sunshine-and-flowers-filled nightmare where all hell breaks loose at a Swedish solstice festival.

Review by Joshua RothkopfUnusually for a horror director, Ari Aster knows the real world is awful enough. Life doles out plenty of pain. ‘Hereditary’, his 201

Ari Aster’s follow-up to his wrenching debut renders the mundane gloom of a breakup as a Technicolor thriller.

Ari Aster wants you to know you’re screwed–that is, if you’re on the wrong side of a deal with demons or deities. In the wake of last year’s wickedly captivating Hereditary, Aster’s whimsical daytime terror Midsommar is seemingly poised as the lamb being led to the sacrificial slaughter of the Sophomore Slump. Lo! Via divine

Ari Aster's folk-horror flick is frightening, beautiful, and just a little unhinged.

The sneaky hex Aster casts has that tight of a grip, on both the characters and the audience.

Ari Aster's new movie is a nightmare about finding the place where you feel like you belong. Spoilers ahead.

Ari Aster follows up his acclaimed film Hereditary with this lyrical, surreal and creeping folk horror tale.

'Midsommar' is a feel-bad horror film about suicide, mercy killings, insanity, graphic nudity, religious hysteria, and the kind of grotesque imagery that exists for no other reason than shock value.

What the opening murder/suicide of Dani’s (Florence Pugh) parents and sister brings to bear on the Swedish vacation that follows is negligible. It’s included mostly because writer-director Ari Aster (taking a backward-step after the chilling Hereditary) thought it would be cool to start in the garage and follow a tube connected to the exhaust pipe as it winds its way inside the house and up the stairs to the master bedroom. Joining Dani on the trip are a quartet of depthless, under-written putzes looking to get high and get laid. Their destination is a menacing Ricola commercial universe where the sun never sets, presumably because terror is more terrifying in broad daylight. I am all for a horror satire that posits an inbred, mentally defective child as the god of a group of Clorox-white religious zealots. But instead of a balls-out political satire, Aster follows a long-winded, 140-minute route that eventually settles on sex and gore as a substitute for meaning. Don’t let the studio-manufactured hype fool you; this is a midsummer’s matinee bore.

Ari Aster's follow-up to "Hereditary" is another slow-burning horror art film that sticks with you long after the credits roll.

Turns out, bad boyfriends and scary pagan rituals make for an intoxicating mix.