By Everyone has that one picture of themselves as a kid at some family cookout, maybe an air show or fireworks, where they’re just bawling their eyes out and no one remembers why. I certainly have a few, and they’re a fresh surprise every time flip open some forgotten photo album lost to inches of dust under the TV. I remember one clearly of me–not bald, somehow–with long blond locks just sitting on my grandmother’s front porch having a big ol’ red-faced cry. Why did anyone bother to stop and take a photograph of this?
Whenever my mom sees it, she laughs like it’s some cute knickknack she can’t part with and says, “Who could possibly know why you were crying?” with a wave of her hand. It’s her reaction that I always find more disturbing than this immortalized moment of childhood grief.
I get the same disturbed tugging of my guts when I look at this poster for Midsommar.
From Ari Aster, the man behind the triumphantly paranoid and horrifying Hereditary, we have this colorful and folksy look at pure dread. I can’t wait to see what sort of strangeness we have to look forward to this summer, and I hope we get at least one more poster along the way. Even Mondo would have a hard time topping this portrait of terrified grief with just the right dose of irony tucked inside that tiny text. It’s a true work of art as far as film posters go, and I hope the movie proper will live up to its promise.
Midsommar covers a couple on-the-rocks as they experience a Wicker Man-esque 9-day festival that’s sure to end in terror. We can watch it during our own outdoor celebration of freedom this Independence Day weekend when it releases on July 2, 2019.
