Midsommar is the sunniest breakup movie ever made. It’s also a two-and-a-half-hour PSA about why you should never let your emotionally unavailable boyfriend take you to a remote Swedish commune where everyone dresses like a linen Etsy ad and smiles just a little too long.
Ari Aster takes all the usual horror tools—darkness, jump scares, creepy basements—and throws them in the trash. Instead, he gives you fields of flowers, daylight that lasts forever, and a folk festival that looks like an antidepressant commercial directed by Satan. Beneath all the handcrafted runes and flower crowns, this is a relationship autopsy disguised as a cult movie, and Florence Pugh is doing open-heart surgery with her face.
Dani, Christian, and the World’s Most Passive-Aggressive Vacation
From the very first frames, Midsommar makes it clear that Dani (Florence Pugh) is not okay, and neither is her relationship. Her bipolar sister kills herself and their parents in a murder-suicide, and Dani calls her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor), who responds with all the warmth and urgency of someone whose DoorDash is late.
Christian is already half-checked out of the relationship before Dani’s life detonates. His friends—Mark (Will Poulter), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren)—openly wonder when he’s going to dump her. Then Dani’s entire family dies, and Christian decides to stay with her out of guilt and cowardice, which is very noble if your definition of “noble” is “emotional hostage-taking.”
A few months later, Dani finds out—by accident—that Christian is going to Sweden with the guys to visit Pelle’s ancestral commune for a once-every-90-years midsummer festival. He hadn’t told her because he “meant to” and then forgot, which is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear from the man holding your heart together with duct tape.
He invites her in a panic, fully expecting her to say no. She says yes. And just like that, emotional codependency and Scandinavian ritual murder board the same flight.
Welcome to Hårga, Land of Sun, Trauma, and Seasonal Human Sacrifice
When they arrive in the Hårga commune, things are… weirdly nice. Everyone is young or picturesque or old in that wise, rustic way. They wear white. They sing. They cook together. They offer mushrooms and tea like slightly more ominous Burning Man volunteers.
Aster makes the place feel unsettling and inviting at the same time. It’s like a wellness retreat run by people who think “self-care” means “voluntary immolation at age 72.”
Which, as it turns out, it does.
The ättestupa scene—where two elders cheerfully swan dive off a cliff onto a rock—is the film’s first big horror punch. Up to that point, you could squint and pretend this is an awkward anthropology trip about grief. Then an old woman jumps, her face explodes, and the commune screams with her. No violins, no stinger, just blunt, bright, sunlit brutality.
Dani is shattered. The others are horrified too, but the academic boys almost immediately start framing it as “fascinating cultural practice.” Christian even uses it as fresh content for his thesis like the true emotional vulture he is.
Pelle, meanwhile, is there like: Yes, our old people kill themselves at 72, but does your capitalist hellscape even havecommunal empathy?
The Horror of Being the Neediest Person in the Room
For all the gore, the most uncomfortable thing in this movie is Dani’s emotional reality. She is raw, desperate, and constantly apologizing for existing. Christian’s friends treat her like an inconvenience; Christian treats her like a chore with feelings.
Pugh plays Dani like a live wire wrapped in a cardigan. Her smiles are brittle. Her apologies never stop. When she has a panic attack, she runs to the bathroom like she’s trying not to leak grief on anyone. It’s devastating to watch—and uncomfortably relatable if you’ve ever been “too much” for someone who refuses to just leave already.
Then there’s Pelle, quietly orbiting her like a compassionate, blond spider. He’s the only one who looks at her and says the quiet part out loud: “Do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?” It’s a warm, tender moment. It’s also absolutely sinister, because Pelle is, let’s not mince words, a cult recruiter with dimples.
Still, he’s not wrong. Compared to Christian, a death cult in flower crowns starts looking… weirdly supportive.
Thesis Fights, Sacred Trees, and Grad Students Deserve to Die
While Dani tries to breathe through her panic, the boys are busy being the worst possible kind of tourists.
Josh, the actual anthropology student, wants to document every rune, song, and ritual for his thesis. Christian, who didn’t even know what he was writing about last week, suddenly decides he’ll write his thesis on the Hårga too, essentially stealing Josh’s topic while eating meatballs at the same table. It’s academic plagiarism in its larval form, and Josh is understandably furious.
Mark, meanwhile, is busy being human garbage: mocking the commune, leering at women, and then—crucially—peeing on the ancestral tree that holds the community’s dead. It’s the most American thing I’ve ever seen on film.
One of the Hårga men screams at him with such feral rage that you know Mark is about to “go for a walk” and never return. When one of the last things we see of him is his face worn like a skin-mask by another man, it somehow still feels generous.
Josh’s fate is even better: he sneaks out at night to take pictures of the forbidden runic texts and gets whacked with a mallet by someone wearing Mark’s empty face like a gruesome ski mask. If you’ve ever wanted to see the phrase “citation needed” turned into a bludgeon, this is your moment.
May Queen, Matchmaking, and Mutual Weaponized Vulnerability
At the center of this floral nightmare is the relationship. And this is where Midsommar is almost disturbingly funny.
Christian is subtly groomed into being a breeding asset by the Hårga. Maja, a 15-year-old commune girl, sets her sights on him with the full support of the elders. She bakes her pubes into his food, draws fertility runes under his bed, and the community basically goes, “Yes, this seems healthy.” Once they’ve dosed him with enough hallucinogenic tea, the sex ritual is less seduction and more cult-assisted sexual Tetris.
While Christian is being psychically coerced into fatherhood in a barn full of naked chanting women, Dani is outside winning the maypole dance on an epic trip of her own. She outlasts everyone in a spinning contest, becomes May Queen, and for the first time in the film, is celebrated instead of tolerated.
When she stumbles upon Christian mid-ritual, it’s the final emotional betrayal she needed—but the way the women respond is where the film gets fascinating. As she collapses sobbing, the Hårga women circle around her and cry with her, matching every gasp and wail. It’s a twisted, cultish form of empathy, but it’s also more validation and collective emotional support than she’s gotten from Christian in their entire relationship.
Somewhere in there is a thesis about how people will accept almost anything—violence, dogma, murder—if it comes wrapped in communal love.
The Breakup to End All Breakups
By the time we get to the final ceremony, the movie drops any pretense: this is about a girl choosing a side.
The Hårga need nine sacrifices. Four are outsiders (RIP Mark, Josh, Simon, Connie), four are from the commune (the two elders from earlier and two volunteers, one of whom goes up in flames with the energy of a man who doesn’t quite grasp “regret”). The final choice goes to Dani, as May Queen: one random Hårga… or Christian.
Christian is paralyzed, stuffed into a bear carcass—truly a divorce metaphor for the ages—and propped up like a taxidermied guilt trip in a wooden temple with the other sacrifices.
There’s a long, silent moment where Dani looks at him. All the gaslighting, neglect, emotional absence, and quiet cruelty are right there. And then she chooses.
Christian is wheeled into the temple, the structure is set on fire, and the Hårga watch as flames devour their offerings. When the fire reaches the living sacrifices, their screams begin, and the commune responds in kind, writhing and wailing with them—shared agony as liturgy.
Dani watches, eyes huge, face crumpling. She sobs—ugly, raw, broken. And then, as the temple collapses and the cult sways in ecstatic unity, her face rearranges itself into a small, eerie smile.
It’s one of the most unsettling final shots in modern horror. She has finally found a place where her pain is heard and mirrored. The cost is her entire moral compass and several human lives, but, you know… nobody’s perfect.
A Sunlit Nightmare and the Pettiest Empowerment Fantasy
Midsommar works because it’s two films at once: a meticulously crafted folk horror story, and a darkly hilarious “good for her” breakup fantasy. The Hårga are monstrous, yes—but so is what Dani survives before she ever sets foot in Sweden.
Aster leans fully into the absurdity of macramé murder cult aesthetics while never losing sight of the emotional core. Pugh carries the movie like she’s bench-pressing a dying star. Reynor’s Christian is so perfectly mediocre that he becomes a horror archetype: the nice-enough guy whose apathy is deadly.
The film is long, weird, and incredibly specific. It’s not going to work for everyone. But if you’ve ever been stuck in a relationship where you’re apologizing for breathing, the final shot of Dani in her flower crown, watching that temple burn, is disturbingly cathartic.
Is joining a murderous pagan commune the healthiest way to process grief and codependency? Absolutely not. Does Midsommar make it look, for one horrifying second, like it might be? Oh yes.
And that’s the real horror.
