// Personal website of Chris Smith

Watched on 2026-06-27. Rating:

I started watching this pretty late in the day, and when I saw the runtime was a bit longer than I expected I thought “I’ll watch the first hour or so then come back tomorrow”. Well, surprise, it’s now 1:30am the next day.

Speaking of expectations… it’s not the horror film I thought it was going to be. It’s undeniably a horror, but there’s so much more to it than that. It’s gruesome and tense in places, but it’s also heartwarming in a way that horrors just aren’t. And it has that sort of vibe I associated with Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite where you’re not quite sure which way round to look at things.

It’s a beautiful film, and almost every scene is so bright and alive. Florence Pugh should have won all the awards for her portrayal of Dani.

I rank all the films I watch, and this has been the toughest so far out of 263 total. When I struggle I ask “if I could only watch one of these again, which would I prefer?”, and by that metric Midsommar landed right at the top. It’s not the easy, fun watch of Easy A (which it displaced in my top spot); it’s not something I’m going to recommend to many people; but it is something special. Maybe that’s just the heat talking, though; watching it a few days after midsummer on the hottest day of the year so far might have been a mistake.