Interesting, I hated Hereditary, thought it was all style no substance. When I saw the trailer for this I thought it looked derivative but could be good, but then saw from the director of Hereditary and that gave me pause.

But then if this is anything like Coherence or The Invitation I will have to give it a go (I loved both of those films). Who am I kidding, I will watch no matter what

it's pretty much (even) dumber copy of The Invitation, although I am not really fan of it too, Coherence is a bit different

I lowered my rating, 6/10 would be above average, but this was really extreme waste of time, form is good, but content is dumb and runtime doesn't justify it, too long to waste my time

I was actually pretty big fan of Hereditary thanks largely to Toni Collette so I was really looking forward to this and finally saw it the other night.

Visually it's pretty interesting, the gore is nice and the daylight setting is unsettling, but the characters are so awful I didn't care about them at all. The lead girl I've seen in other movies but she's very boring here. The movie is just too passive. Everyone's drugged and seemingly have no survival instinct so they never try to fight back or run, the cult just has them and that's it, and the lead girl basically becomes a turncoat and gets her boyfriend killed after he'd been drugged and raped by the cult.

It was nice to see a movie in the theater that wasn't a prequel/sequel/remake but this should have been better.

I agree, this movie was too long for the story being told.

I'm just disappointed that our female protagonist wasn't also sacrificed for being such a headcase. The kind of character so annoying, you want their death to be written into the script.

@furious_iz said:

Interesting, I hated Hereditary, thought it was all style no substance.

That strikes me as an unusual stance on Hereditary. Nothing wrong with not liking it and the film definitely has it's flaws. But this is one of the last horror films I'd consider to suffer from a lack of substance.

The way the film conveyed a family passing on a long, hereditary tradition of emotional distance that continued to cause damage to each generation felt very real, deep and rich with psychological subtext. The way Aster uses cinematic spacing and slow, melancholy silence to make you feel this disconnect is the kind of thing that is usually unheard of in the genre. Especially today.

And I struggle to think of many horror films in which the characters are as deep and layered. The very thing I appreciate about Ari Aster's approach is that his films are character pieces first and horror films second.

It's horror films like Insidious that I would personally see as all style no substance.

The Invitation is a much better paced movie, more suspense and rhthym to it as well as much better actors...

Midsommar makes up for it a bit with the visuals and the interesting setting and concept... Pugh is very watchable...

But yeah... the movie is a bit too airless sometimes... trying to seem deep... I felt the same about "It Follows" and some of the other arthouse horror movies... I still enjoyed it... Worth checking out

Wow, 2 and a half hours is long for something like this. Havent seen it so I might give it a shot. When it came out it looked like The Wicker Man goes to Sweden.

@znexyish said:

When it came out it looked like The Wicker Man goes to Sweden.

Pretty much.

It's more like The Wicker Man meets the Hostel movies in Sweden, with a small bit of Salo thrown in for good measure. I just saw it; I'm having a difficult time getting that nightmare out of my head. I feel you guys as far as it being overlong and also as far as some writerly flaws in the script. But this features an intriguing mix of the familiar and the utterly bizarre that impressed me, at least at first.

@CelluloidFan said:

It's more like The Wicker Man meets the Hostel movies in Sweden, with a small bit of Salo thrown in for good measure. I'm having a difficult time getting that nightmare out of my head. I feel you guys as far as it being overlong and also as far as some writerly flaws in the script. But this features an intriguing mix of the familiar and the utterly bizarre that impressed me, at least at first.

It's not the worst thing ever, but imo horror works better when it's shorter and to the point. My rule of thumb is horror should be as close to 90 minutes as it can get, longer than 100 minutes and it needs to be really good or Silence of the Lambs/Se7en quality, and this wasn't. I would have liked this more had it been 95 minutes.

@cswood said:

@CelluloidFan said:

It's more like The Wicker Man meets the Hostel movies in Sweden, with a small bit of Salo thrown in for good measure. I'm having a difficult time getting that nightmare out of my head. I feel you guys as far as it being overlong and also as far as some writerly flaws in the script. But this features an intriguing mix of the familiar and the utterly bizarre that impressed me, at least at first.

It's not the worst thing ever

No, nowhere close. I mean, the Dani character was interestingly drawn out and again, the almost-total daylight setting is a great touch.