Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor’s vacation goes horribly wrong in the new trailer for Ari Aster’s Midsommar. The followup to Aster’s critically acclaimed feature debut, Hereditary, Midsommar follows a couple (Pugh and Reynor) as they travel to Sweden for a rare version of a local village’s annual mid-summer festival. Of course, this being a horror movie, thing don’t go as expected and the pair soon uncover the terrible truth behind the villagers and their cult-like rituals. Actors like Will Poulter (The Maze Runner) and William Jackson Harper (The Good Place) round out the primary cast as the couple’s friends who join them on this unintended trip from hell.
The marketing for Midsommar has avoided diving too deeply into the film’s plot so far, and instead focused on clips of the sun-lit setting (which was “played” by Hungary). At the same time, the movie’s teaser trailer didn’t shy away from more explicit hints of the horrors to come either, offering glimpses of sights like a bear being disemboweled and a woman rubbing her blood-stained hands on a stone full of mysterious carvings. Now, however, there’s an official trailer that explores the larger story in greater detail.
A24 has released the full-length trailer for Midsommar online, and will probably attach it to upcoming horror movies like Brightburn in theaters. You can check it out in the space below.
As seen here, Pugh and Reynor’s characters are on the verge of breaking up when Midsommar starts off, as Pugh struggles to deal with the aftermath of some as-yet unspecified traumatic event. In fact, the film at large appears to be a story about a couple who’re trying, but failing to figure out how to end their relationship, as told through the lens of a Wicker Man-style horror movie about an isolated, cultish group of people and their disturbing ways. Aster, in an interview with Vulture in March, even called Midsommar “a breakup movie, in the same way that ‘Hereditary’ is a family tragedy”. He also described it as being a different kind of horror film than his feature debut, jokingly referring to it as “‘Wizard of Oz’ for perverts”.
To a degree, one can see where Aster is getting his Wizard of Oz comparison from in this new trailer. Midsommar might not take place in a magical world somewhere over the rainbow, but it does, in fact, follow a young woman as she escapes the problems in her real life and journeys to a setting that’s far more dangerous than its friendly and (literally) sunny exterior would suggest. There are also shades of Hereditary in the latest footage, as far as the style and specific camera angles are concerned. All in all, it’ll be interesting to see how this one compares to Aster’s debut, both in terms of the movie’s quality and its reception among the greater horror-loving community.
Key Release Dates
Midsommar
Release Date:2019-07-03
