Midsommar
Midsommar is a genuinely good film. That's the most important thing to say before everything else, because it shapes how dangerous it is.
Full analysis below
Midsommar does not qualify as a woke trap despite its negative margin. A woke trap requires woke ideology that is hidden until after 50% runtime. Midsommar's feminist liberation framing is front-loaded: the film establishes from its opening minutes that Dani's relationship with Christian is presented as a source of pain rather than support. Christian's emotional unavailability and his friends' hostility toward Dani are established in the first act. The film's progressive ideological frame, that Dani's 'liberation' through joining a murder cult is presented as healing, is visible in the film's structure and tone from the outset. The horror of the cult's methods escalates through the film, but the feminist framing of Dani's arc is never hidden. It is, in fact, the point.
Our Verdict on Midsommar
Midsommar is a genuinely good film. That's the most important thing to say before everything else, because it shapes how dangerous it is.
If Midsommar were a crude feminist horror film, if the cult were obviously evil from the first scene and the protagonist's eventual participation were clearly framed as tragic, there would be nothing to discuss beyond the graphic content. But Midsommar is sophisticated. Ari Aster is a filmmaker who understands exactly what he's doing, and what he's doing is using the horror genre's emotional vocabulary to construct a feminist liberation narrative in which the 'liberation' involves burning your boyfriend alive.
The setup: Dani (Florence Pugh) loses her entire family in a murder-suicide perpetrated by her bipolar sister. In the film's opening minutes. Her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) fields her grief call with barely concealed impatience, having been about to break up with her. He stays with her out of guilt rather than love, which the film makes clear to everyone in the relationship except Dani. His friends, particularly the crass Mark (Will Poulter), resent Dani's presence in their social group.
Christian's grad school friend Pelle invites the group to his hometown in rural Sweden for a midsommar celebration. The commune is called the Harga. They have lived in this valley for generations. They have a calendar, a mythology, a specific and elaborately detailed ritual practice. They are also a murder cult.
The film's first major horror sequence is a cliff-jumping ceremony in which two elderly Harga members leap from a high cliff as a ritualized way of ending their lives at 72. One dies in the fall. The other doesn't, and is beaten to death with a mallet while the American guests watch in horror. This is where Aster reveals his hand: the ceremony is presented with ethnographic specificity and a certain cold beauty. The Harga aren't performing for the Americans. They don't care about the Americans' horror. They are simply doing what they do.
This is the film's most interesting formal achievement and its most ideologically loaded move. By presenting the cult's practices with the visual language of anthropological documentation rather than horror-movie villainy, the film asks you to extend something close to cultural respect toward murder. Aster has stated explicitly that he wanted the Harga to feel like a real community. He succeeded. The problem is what he built on that success.
The male characters in Midsommar exist on a spectrum from useless to monstrous. Christian is emotionally unavailable and eventually, through a drug-assisted ritual, participates in a sex ceremony with a Harga woman while Dani watches. Josh (William Jackson Harper) photographs sacred artifacts he was explicitly told not to photograph, which gets him killed. Mark (Will Poulter) urinates on a sacred ancestral tree after being told not to, which gets him killed. These deaths are presented with a casual quality that signals: these men got what they deserved.
Dani, meanwhile, is welcomed. She is given the hallucinogenic tea that opens her emotional experience. She participates in the May Queen competition and is crowned. When she witnesses Christian's ritual sex ceremony, her grief and betrayal are mirrored by the Harga women who surround her and mirror her crying, sharing her pain in the commune's tradition of communal emotional experience. This is presented as what she needed: a community that sees her and feels with her. What she was denied by Christian and his friends.
The film ends with Dani choosing one of the nine sacrifices required to complete the midsommar ritual. She chooses Christian. He is sewn into a bear carcass and burned alive in a barn alongside the others. Dani watches from outside. She goes through several expressions of horror and grief before arriving at something that looks like peace, or release, or relief. The final shot is of her smiling.
The progressive critical establishment received this ending as cathartic. Buzzfeed published a piece titled 'Midsommar Is the Perfect Breakup Movie.' The Ringer's feminist film criticism celebrated Dani's 'liberation.' This is the reading the film invites. The woman who was emotionally abandoned by the man in her life finds, through a pagan commune's ritual murder, the emotional community she was denied.
You have to be honest about what this film is. It is technically extraordinary. Florence Pugh's performance is among the best in recent horror. Pawel Pogorzelski's sunlit cinematography is unlike anything else in the genre. Bobby Krlic's score is genuinely unsettling. And the film's ideological project is the presentation of feminist liberation through the lens of murder, and its critical reception celebrated it as exactly that.
The VVWS score reflects what the film actually is, not what its craft quality deserves.
Woke Tropes & Content Analysis
Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier
🔴 Woke Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female liberation from toxic male relationship as the film's moral arc | 5 | High | High | 6.3 |
| Pagan/pre-Christian spirituality presented as authentic and emotionally superior to modernity | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Male characters uniformly incompetent, selfish, or morally compromised | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Collectivist commune as utopian alternative to Western individualism | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| Female emotional breakdown as hero's journey and spiritual awakening | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| TOTAL WOKE | 20.6 | |||
🟢 Traditional Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grief as genuine and consequential human experience | 2 | Moderate | Low | 1 |
| Community as human necessity | 2 | Low | Low | 1.4 |
| TOTAL TRADITIONAL | 2.4 | |||
Score Margin: -18 WOKE
Director: Ari Aster
STRONGLY WOKE. Aster's two theatrical features before Eddington (2025) are both best understood as progressive horror fables. Hereditary (2018) is a grief horror film that also functions as a story about a woman destroyed by her relationship to a patriarchal cult. Midsommar is a breakup film in which the protagonist's escape from a bad relationship is literalized as joining a different cult that murders her boyfriend. His stated intent in interviews is to use horror as a vehicle for exploring emotional and psychological states that mainstream films avoid. The emotional states he finds most worth exploring, according to his filmography, are those of women escaping from, or being destroyed by, the men in their lives. Aster is a technically gifted filmmaker whose ideology is fully coherent and consistently woke by VVWS definition.Ari Aster emerged from the AFI Conservatory and made a series of short films before Hereditary turned him into the prestige horror director of his generation. He is a filmmaker with genuine craft: his compositions are deliberate, his pacing is patient, his use of natural light in Midsommar is extraordinary. He knows exactly what he is doing at every moment. This is not accidental ideology. Midsommar's feminist framing is not something that crept in unintended from the margins. It is the film. Aster has been explicit in interviews that he conceived Midsommar as a breakup movie in which the horror genre's conventions are used to externalize the experience of leaving a bad relationship. What that means in practice: the horror cult is presented with genuine beauty and cultural authenticity, and the protagonist's emotional journey within it is framed as positive, while every male character except Pelle is presented as varying degrees of toxic, selfish, or oblivious. The ideology and the craft are both fully intentional and both fully deployed.
Content Breakdown
Adult Viewer Insight
The most useful analytical frame for Midsommar is not horror but myth. Aster is working in a tradition that goes back to The Wicker Man (1973), which used a pagan murder ritual to interrogate the suppression of pre-Christian sexuality and communal life by Christian civilization. The Harga in Midsommar represent a different version of the same thing: a pre-modern community that integrates death, sexuality, grief, and communal belonging in ways that modern Western individualism cannot offer. For Dani, whose modern life has given her a grief she cannot process and a relationship that cannot hold her, the Harga offer something that works for her, even though it works through murder. Aster's ideological investment is in the idea that the modern Western arrangement, individual romantic partnership, liberal institutions, emotional self-management, is failing people in ways that pre-modern collectivist structures did not. The pagan commune is the antidote. The boyfriend is modernity. Modernity gets burned. This is not a conservative argument.
Parental Guidance
Rated R for disturbing ritualistic violence and grisly images, strong sexual content, nudity, drug use and language. Midsommar is not appropriate for anyone under 18 and many adults will find its content genuinely distressing. The graphic violence includes two on-screen beatings to death, explicit dismemberment and skinning of a human body, and a final burning-alive sequence. The sexual content is explicit and includes a graphic group ritual scene. Drug use is central to the plot. For conservative viewers, the ideological content is as disturbing as the graphic material: the film presents a woman's participation in her boyfriend's ritualized murder as emotional liberation and healing. This is not a reading that requires interpretive work. It is the film's stated intent, confirmed by the director, and celebrated by its critical reception.
Is Midsommar Safe for Kids?
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