Midsommar

Midsommar presents itself as a meditation on female empowerment through the lens of folk horror, and the critical establishment has largely accepted this framing with academic enthusiasm. The film traces protagonist Dani's journey from emotional abandonment to acceptance within a matriarchal cult, a narrative arc that some scholars have praised as a subversion of traditional final-girl tropes. However, this reading requires a generous interpretation of what constitutes empowerment when the heroine achieves it through participation in ritualistic murder. The film's irony appears lost on some quarters of its audience, who have embraced it as unambiguous feminist cinema rather than as a dark comedy about the hollowness of seeking belonging in violent spaces.

The cast is predominantly white, with William Jackson Harper as a notable supporting presence, though the film makes no particular effort to engage with racial themes or representation beyond mere inclusion. There are no LGBTQ+ characters, no environmental messaging, no critique of capitalism, and no engagement with neurodivergence or body diversity. The film's sole claim to progressive sensibility rests entirely on its gender dynamics, and even that is mediated through Ari Aster's characteristic detachment and ambiguity. The pagan setting and folkloric trappings provide aesthetic cover for what is ultimately a fairly conventional narrative about manipulation and complicity.

Stripped of interpretive apparatus, Midsommar is a horror film about bad people doing terrible things, with the gender of those people being incidental to the violence. That it has been elevated to the status of progressive cinema speaks less to the film's actual content than to how eager critics have become to find socially conscious scaffolding in commercially viable entertainment. The film benefits from being positioned as more culturally aware than it actually is, a phenomenon that reveals more about contemporary critical discourse than about the film itself.