Midsommar
See, The Wicker Man, it’s possible to make a serious film about dressing people with bear skins, flirting with Aryans, and burning effigies. “Is this Waco” is the best aside comment.
The secret is having that intro, so you flashback during the psychedelic scenes, emotional one-two punches.
I don’t fully understand the protagonist, but I have met people like that. She freaks out over something she cannot control, but will not go out of her way to help either. Her internal feedback loop works in reverse, she will spin out of control without external validation and soothing words. There are so many massive red flags she notices and ignore, but she perseveres all the way to the May Dance. The last burning man provides relief, but it seems to be temporary, she refuses to talk about her parents to everyone, but she can’t cope either.
The boyfriend is just a scumbag, not only to her, but to his buddy that first decided on a thesis about midsummer rituals. He deserves being drugged into cumming into that girl while a bunch of older women moan in unison. There’s even one of them that pushes his ass, to make sure he doesn’t pull out.
The girl then pulls a The Big Lebowski, wriggling to improve the chances of conception.
This is not all psychological horror like Hereditary. The psychological aspects are just the salt. The meat and potatoes are psychedelic hippie drugs, and some body horror.
Not speaking Swedish, I missed the fascist banner over the road in that scene that literally puts a spin on The Shining car ride.
The cast only got bigger afterwards. The protagonist and wailer-in-chief is that Oppenheimer harlot, her scumbag boyfriend is the brother from The Peripheral. The scumbag idiot buddy is the Bandersnatch dude, and I don’t know anyone else.
The meek but studious friend being shafted by the boyfriend and simply killed; and the other couple, who freak the fuck out with simple ritualised suicide and homicide and fail to leave the compound.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.