Midsommar cast sat in stunned silence after first viewing of horror film
Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary, the phantasmagorical horror movie Midsommar, is likely to leave a lot of people speechless. Certainly it had that effect on the cast when they first saw the film earlier this month — and they, of course, knew what was coming.
“Tough! F—in’ tough!” actor Jack Reynor says when EW asks about his experience of seeing the movie. “We watched it as a cast together in New York. We all laughed through the first two-thirds of the film, at all that gallows humor, and then for the final third of the film, all of us were silent. When the credits rolled, there was no ‘High-five! You did an amazing job! Oh my God, you’re so good in the film!’ It was just silence. All of us sat there with our heads in our hands. It was a good 10 minutes of not talking.”
He adds, “It’s a hard one to digest, and there’s a lot unpack in it. But that’s the kind of sh— that it’s worth doing. Last time I got that feeling watching a film was when I watched In the Realm of the Senses, the Nagisa Oshima [film]. That f—ed me up too. So it was the same kind of feeling — just heaviness. But you’re watching something that has been meticulously designed to create that feeling in you.”
Midsommar stars Reynor and Florence Pugh as an American couple, Christian and Dani, who embark on a trip to Scandinavia with friends Mark (Will Poulter), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), the latter of whom has invited them to visit his remote village in Sweden. “They’re a really weird, culty kind of commune,” Reynor told EW earlier this year. “Everybody’s all dressed in white, they have strange kinds of social cliques.”
Midsommar opens July 3.
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