It starts with good premises, but is lost due to a miserable script and a direction that needs direction.
Ari Aster is not a director that I consider good. This is his second feature film, and he didn't show great talent for directing here. However, worse than his direction is his absolute lack of writing skills: the script he wrote here is mediocre, to be nice, and completely kills the film.
What I liked most about this film was the extraordinary cinematography, full of color and light and joy that makes us feel the warmth and natural vibrancy of the beginning of Summer. By largely setting his film in a rural ambience, Aster was almost able to demonize urban life, portraying urban environments as gloomy, dark, sinister and depressing. In fact, he even creates a link between the main character's agony and the depressive environments of urban life: there is not a sole positive or warm image before the characters set foot on the fields of Sweden... or rather Hungary, the country where most of the filming took place, perhaps taking advantage of the tax benefits that were given to foreign film productions there.
The sets and costumes could not be more appealing, especially to audiences who are already interested in Nordic traditions, witchcraft, Wicca or new age paganism: we have runes, we have hippie-style flowers in their hair, we have people in white and barefoot dancing around poles, we have fertile and sexually desirable youngsters, we have the recreational and ritualistic consumption of drugs and hallucinogens, we have happy people living in a community, with no private property and in polyamory... it seems like a John Lennon dream. This is beautiful, attractive and seductive in the same way that it is unbelievable and contradicts the basic human instincts: the appetite for violence and the desire to have things. Unfortunately, and largely due to a poorly written script, the film is no more than that. The director/screenwriter was unable to give the film a conclusion or create a credible threat. Clearly inspired by another film (“The Wicker Man”), it lacks a good ending, there are too many stupid scenes (for example, when one of the characters cries heartlessly and is surrounded by a choir that almost turns it into a song) and there are too many loose ends in this story, which becomes more and more idiotic. To make everything more ignoble, there is a subliminal anti-Christian message that becomes clear when we see that the most vilified character is named Christian...
The actors are not to blame for the misery that this film was. Florence Pugh is the actress who stands out the most and does the most interesting work, but Vilhelm Blomgren also offers us a well-done performance. Will Poulter, one of the actors I know best here, seems underutilized, with a character that only appears occasionally and is irrelevant to the plot. William Harper also does what he can, but he doesn't have the space or material to show what he's worth. In the European cast, Isabelle Grill and Gunnel Fred are the actresses who deserve the most attention: each of them, in their own way, tried to be mysterious and unsettling, and they achieved this in the way they had imagined.