After weeks of contemplating whether or not to see this movie, I finally decided (and got the chance) to see it during last weekend. This was due to the fact the movie was released while I was on holiday trip and I tried to play catch up with many more new released movies during the period. But as it garnered quite a lot of hype, I was still keen to find out about the movie. As my wife was not a fan of such film, I saw this one by myself. Anyway, let's get on with the movie.
Brief Story Line
A group of college students that consisted of a rather depressed Dani (Florence Pugh - Lady Macbeth, Outlaw King etc) with her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor - The Man with the Iron Heart etc) and his friends Mark (Will Poulter - The Maze Runner, The Revenant etc), Josh (William Jackson Harper - The Good Place TV series etc) & Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren) went to Sweden to experience a midsummer celebration with Pelle's community which only happened every 90 years.
Unbeknownst to Dani and friends, this cult-like community had a very unique and shocking activities in store which would really disturb their supposedly stress-free holiday trip.
So what would happen to this group? Find them all in this truly disturbing cult horror movie.
End of Brief Story Line
After reading lots of comments on the social media about this movie, and when I found out about the director, I already thought that this would be a different kind of horror film. Ari Aster who previously directed the critically acclaimed horror movie Hereditary provided another unusual type of horror once again. Lucky for me, because I already saw the trailer, I could have already guessed that this would be a slow build up type of horror and did not expect it to be an intense movie. So I was not surprised at all by the slow pace.
The first half of the movie was filled with some drama, in particular the showing of Florence Pugh portraying a woman who just experienced emotional trauma and was really attached with her boyfriend who was having his own personal dilemma. The scenes when they reached Sweden were truly beautiful and breathtaking, especially during the summer time where the sky was really blue. But once that shocking moment was shown, my views of the beauty scenery totally changed. Good thing I already suspected something and braced myself for the scene.
The following scenes were more like the aftermath situation and a bit of mystery as well. But one thing's certain, I personally did not feel too much intensity. The feel that I had was mostly anxiety of what disturbing scenes would be shown later. I checked through the various websites and found out the movie's duration was 147 minutes (which was very very long). However, the film's duration in Indonesian theater was only 138 minutes. That meant around 9 minutes of scenes had been cut by Indonesian censorship body. To be honest, I had never known of a movie with that much deleted scenes, so you could imagine how disturbing those scenes would be. Btw, there were no mid or post end credit scenes in here.
This movie was something that I was not accustomed to. It was a bit tiring emotionally. I was pretty glad that my wife did not see the movie as she would not be happy after watching this. Yes I can certainly see the appeal of this movie to people who love such genre or to movie critics, but for casual audience like me, I was not able to really enjoy it. Sometimes I felt what was the point of this film except just to make us felt disturbed. Guess I am not as sophisticated as most people who had only good comments about the film. But I did think the musical background was really good as it managed to make the anxiety sense enhanced, especially during the build up to that truly shocking moment.
Overall I thought this was an unusually disturbing movie. Something better to be seen when your mind is free of bad thoughts but be warned that you would end up with a irritated feeling of having witnessed too much uneasiness and tiring moments. It is a movie more suitable for people who do not mind being anxious throughout half the movie and for sure if you are OK with around 9 minutes of cut scenes if you watch it in Indonesian theaters. However, if you are easily depressed, I would suggest not to see this movie at all. The choice is yours.
Mike's movie moments rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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