3:30 The problem with red flags is that when you're wearing rose-coloured glasses, they all just look like flags. (Paraphrased from Bojack Horseman, which is the best exploration of mental health in any visual fictional media imo)

Oh you are FAST. 5:48 and you've clocked it? Again? I love that but i am sorry i cannot watch a film with you without being scared youll solve it. LOVE your attention to detail. Love love love. Thank you. Thank youuuu!

What's so sad is that the cult ultimately treated her with more respect than her boyfriend and his friends did. She made out as the May Queen!! 😂

It's hard not to get emotional watching that first scene edit: 6:15 the painting on the wall may be foreshadowing

It’s a break up movie. It’s a testament to Ari Aster’s mastery that he misdirects us with such skill into making us believe we are watching a horror film. It’s a break up movie with a happy ending. Of course it is more than that. There are multiple themes interwoven into the film, such as anti-ethnocentrism and suspension of cultural bias in academia and how that sets the tone for Western Intelectualism, subject/object, and distance. Another related theme is the hidden aspects of cultures and subcultures. (You don’t think we in the modern West have our own forms of ritual killings?) One thing that needs to be cleared up is that all four friends are graduate students in anthropology. Two of them are preparing to write their theses. And I think that implies that the cult in the film is old, perhaps very old. Could it date to before introduction of Christianity to Scandinavia? If so, if this is a vestigial preservation of the original culture, there’s no telling how far back it goes. If the cult is centuries or millennia old, one can begin to imagine how it has survived into modernity (including the practice of luring sperm and egg donors to avoid genetic problems), how it has managed to remain hidden. The viewpoint rotating 180° is a very important transition and not just a technique to heighten the creepiness. The inversion signifies that we are no longer in the daylight world of the conscious mind, but have entered the subconscious. I’m not saying that everything that happens thereafter is a dream or is unreal. Rather I would say we’ve entered a different level of reality, a world of symbols, ritual, and significance. Remember that the road inversion occurs before the taking of psychedelic drugs. It’s a threshold moment. It’s a subtle move. Nothing ruins a horror movie than the revelation, “but it was all a dream”. The inversion indicates that we’ve traveled into the realm where dreams reside. Before the inversion, there is a whimsical picture of a bear and a little girl that hangs over Dani’s bed. Is this mere foreshadowing or is Aster telling us something about entering a mythic landscape. The mythic (or whimsical, if you prefer) elements of the picture are contained within a frame. After the inversion, we have traveled into that frame. We don’t recognize the edges because the frame has literally become the frame of the film (note to self: check IMDB for Midsommar’s aspect ratio). I think it’s simpler to just think of this as a break up film. If you go further, you start to see the threads of meaning that I’m mentioning, but these threads lead us deeper into the labrynth, not out of it.