Midsommar

Director: Ari Aster
Year Released: 2019
Rating: 1.5

After a murder-suicide that involved her parents and bi-polar sister, Dani (Florence Pugh) goes to a summer 'festival' in Sweden with her (negligent) boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and some of his friends, only to find it's a pagan cult with some truly bizarre rituals.  All the gratuitous gore (smashed heads! dismemberment!) and full frontal nudity (what is with Aster and old naked ladies?) are just there for shock value and to conceal that it's actually a gauche Bad Breakup Movie, in which Dani gets "revenge" for Christian being a lying dope and getting caught having (coerced) intercourse with one of the village girls.  The influences are very clear - The Wicker Man combined with nods to Tarsem Singh and Parajanov - but on a textual level it's quite dumb: sure, the 'foreigners' are 'disrespectful' and ignorant, but they're just trying to make sense of the weirdness, and no one deserves to be executed and incinerated for that (and they're certainly not worse than a murderous cult).  One last thing: I've never had a girl bake her pubic hair into a pie for me to eat - am I missing out?