Midsommar is a true disappoint when compared to Hereditary in my opinion. Imagine Hereditary's ending; but it's almost 2 and a half hours long. I'm sorry, but it just wasn't any good beyond the first hour or so.
I would say it opened up pretty strong. We get some backstory on Dani and it's all pretty interesting, and they do end up subverting what I figured was a "we are all in on it" trope, which she does end up dreaming once herself. However... the decisions made by the characters in this film were nearly all bad. The thing about bad decision making in horror films is that everyone is ready to jump on characters that do this pretty quickly. Like how often does the "girl runs up the stairs instead of out the door" thing get brought up? Or how about "who's there?". Yeah, everyone agrees those are almost always pretty shitty. But just because you wrap up your bad decisions with colorful language and an "artsy" attempt at portraying it doesn't make your characters look any more intelligent. Take for example Christian, just a load of terrible decisions to be had here. "What's this? No... I don't want to drink it." "It'll be ok." "Oh, alright, sure I'll drink it I guess". Then you've got Dani; whom I feel like we're supposed to feel sorry for and agree with. Yeah, Christian is a bit of a dick sure. He isn't there for her when she's going through emotional difficulties. But we're led to believe that Dani has a lot of problems, she even admits it herself. I don't feel like leaning on one party of a relationship is fair; it's a two-way street. If you are constantly burdening your partner with your problems, they'll never feel like they can come to you with theirs because they'll view you as too weak to handle it or too preoccupied to be of any comfort to them. Despite his feelings about Dani, he sticks with the relationship and that's enough proof he must care at least a little. I'm not saying he was perfect but if this movie wanted me to go all in on this weird cult group "feeling what she's feeling (literally), they're finally what Dani needed because they'll be there for her" then yeah, no. Again, just because you paint with a lot of colors doesn't make it some beautiful masterpiece. It's a huge mess of nothing after the first hour or so. ---