Reseñas de la crítica

With its dreamy tremolandos and rich harmonies, much of the score sounds like a folk-art watercolour of Richard Wagner’s operas, Claude Debussy’s Prélude à l'Après-midi d'un faune (1894) or Maurice Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912), all of which sought to conjure the world of pagan mythology.

[B]eware the filmmaker who’s exercising, when just making films will do. Aster has some good ideas, and skill at bringing them to life onscreen... But Aster is obsessed with building tension to the point of losing the plot. He can’t stop at merely glancing or suggesting.

Midsommar remains one of the most original and challenging genre films in recent years, owing a clear debt to the folk horror cinema of the 1970s, yet resisting the pull of pastiche. Aster has concocted a weird mixture of dread, black humour and pathos, conjuring sympathy for the devil in a feverish hallucination.

Midsommar... is a delicious prank of a film that’s by turns heroically upsetting and deeply funny. It’s barely serious, in fact, except when it absolutely means business. Aster is some new cinematic god of misrule, tickling blossoms under your nose with one hand, while he uses the other to sneak a poisoned blade almost lovingly between your ribs.

By the time the group gets to Sweden, the movie, only a few minutes old, is virtually over: it’s built on such a void of insight and experience, such a void of character and relationships, that even the first level of the house of narrative cards can’t stand.

As the film sways drunkenly towards its inevitable conclusion, Aster fails to conjure a sense of dread or even tension – essential qualities of the horror genre... The film works better as a comedy than a horror, skewering its ignorant US tourists, and better still as a spiteful relationship drama.

Aster is superb at striking a mood and maintaining it for the full duration. Reunited with his Hereditary cinematographer, Pawel Pogorzelski, he pulls off a visual feast that is akin to true contemporary avant-garde cinema... Yet while Midsommar never bores or truly overstays its welcome, its languor wobbles into meandering tonal shifts, with unlikely intrusions of absurdist humor.

As he did in Hereditary, Aster puts much of his emphasis on singular, shocking images. He lets the camera creep closer and closer until we become consumed by what see before us... The film, which stretches to nearly two and a half hours, is in absolutely no rush to reach its horrifying conclusion.

Midsommar recycles the memorable qualities of Hereditary, but to no meaningful end. Aster simply employs them to generate a sense of gravitas, which he dashes as soon as Midsommar transforms into a full-blown horror movie.

But in capitalizing on Hereditary’s success, Aster has created something far more hollow about its supposedly human concerns—a film of calculated gesture that fits more cynically into the recent spate of what has, rightly or wrongly, been corralled under the term “elevated horror.”

It’s a daft, hallucinogenic, Ikea folk-horror along the lines of The Wicker Man (1973), as rich, polished and worked as that famous ancient vessel the Gundestrup cauldron.

Perhaps Midsommar doesn’t jell because its impulses are so bifurcated. It’s a parable of a woman’s religious awakening — that’s also a woman’s fantasy of revenge against a man who didn’t meet her emotional needs — that’s also a male director’s masochistic fantasy of emasculation at the hands of a matriarchal cult.