Don’t recognize the name Ari Aster? He’s the dude who made Hereditary, you know, the scariest and/or most f-cked-up movie. A lot of people thought Toni Collette should be an Oscar contender for her work in Hereditary, which, if the Academy was less genre-biased, she definitely would have been. She gave a top-five performance for the year, easy. Ari Aster came out strong with Hereditary, a movie that polarized audiences but set its mark in style and batsh-ttery, and reminding everyone that Toni Collette is a f-cking fantastic actress. So there is a lot of potential in Ari Aster’s next film. Maybe not box office potential, as audiences pretty much hated Hereditary, but potential for him to ruin summer camp the way he just ruined high school parties—honestly that whole sequence haunts me, it’s so well done and horrible and you KNOW what is coming from the moment they get in the car but then it happens and it’s like, OH NO, and Toni Collette’s scream coming from off camera is just the perfect touch—and yet more potential for Florence Pugh.
Midsommar is Aster’s movie about a cult sleep away camp having a midsummer festival. Florence Pugh is there. Florence Pugh is everywhere, and now she is here, trapped at this very obvious white people cult camp. People are making a breathy noise that reminds me of the tongue click in Hereditary—Ari Aster is out here ruining mouth sounds forever. The only question I have about cult camp is which prince of hell are these evil people worshipping? Also, is this now the Ari Aster cult cinematic universe? There’s a drawing with a symbol in this teaser not unlike the witchy cult symbol in Hereditary. Not exactly the same, but similar enough that, combined with the breathy noise, makes me wonder if Aster is working through every demonic cult as part of a f-cked up horror universe. I would not be opposed to that. Sounds leagues better than Universal’s “Dark Universe”, which they’re still trying to get off the ground in some form. I am here for Ari Aster’s trip into the woods, I just would like to know if I need to brace for anything as bad as the car scene in Hereditary.