Misunderstood as Horror, Florence Pugh’s Emotional Journey

From Little Women to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Florence Pugh has built her career on emotionally intense roles since her film debut in the 2014 movie, The Falling. But nothing hit quite like her performance as Dani in Ari Aster’s Midsommar. Released in 2019, the film was immediately labeled as a horror flick, praised for its unsettling imagery and deeply disturbing rituals. That label has stuck — but it’s terribly misleading.

Seven years later, Midsommar still gets talked about as a horror movie first, when that’s not really what it is. Midsommar uses the language of horror, but its impact comes from somewhere much more uncomfortable. Strip away all the shock value, and what’s left isn’t fear — it’s emotional recognition.

Midsommar Uses Horror Tropes, But It Isn’t Designed As A Horror

On the surface, Midsommar has all the components of a traditional horror film: a grieving protagonist, an isolated setting, and a group of outsiders stumbling into a dangerous community with rules they don’t understand. From the moment Dani joins Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends on their anthropology trip to Sweden following the death of her entire family, the film signals that something is wrong.

The Hårga’s rituals quickly escalate from strange to outright disturbing, culminating in sinister acts of violence that are impossible to ignore or forget. But the way those moments are presented is what makes Midsommar stand out. There’s no darkness to hide behind, no jump scares to manipulate audiences. Everything unfolds in bright, almost suffocating sunlight.

Unlike other horror films, Midsommar doesn’t build up fear. Instead, it forces the audience to sit with discomfort and watch every detail without a single ounce of relief. The audience isn’t asked to be scared; every bleak scene is a test of their emotional endurance as Aster aimed to reveal an uncomfortable truth with the cult of the Hårga as a backdrop.

Midsommar’s Real Antagonist Is Christian (& His Friends)

For all its shocking imagery, the most recognizable part of Midsommar is not the violence — it’s Dani’s crumbling relationship with Christian. From the beginning, their relationship is defined by imbalance. Dani is grieving the loss of her sister and parents, clinging to a partner who barely supports her. Christian, on the other hand, is emotionally negligent, dismissive, and even resentful of Dani’s needs.

It’s this attitude that sets Christian up as the main antagonist in Midsommar, along with his friends. The tension between him and Dani only intensifies once the group arrives in Sweden. Christian’s passivity becomes its own form of cruelty. He forgets Dani’s birthday, fails to defend her when his friends insult and mock her, he dismisses her pleas to leave Sweden, and ultimately betrays her in the most humiliating way possible.

This dynamic makes Midsommar truly unsettling, making audiences react to something real. Christian isn’t a villain in the traditional sense, but his emotional negligence drives the film’s central conflict far more than the Hårga ever does. Even the film’s most infamous sequence — Dani discovering Christian with another woman in the midst of a mating ritual and screaming the pain away — lands because it’s so painfully human.

Dani’s breakdown isn’t about the sacrificial ritual itself, or about her coronation as the Hårga’s May Queen. It’s about betrayal, grief, and finally confronting a relationship that was already, slowly, falling apart.

Ari Aster Himself Called Midsommar A Breakup Movie

If there’s any doubt about how Midsommar should be interpreted, director Ari Aster has cleared it up. In a Vice interview, Aster described the film as a breakup movie, rooted in his own personal experience with heartbreak. “Midsommar for me was my breakup movie,” he said, “It felt as big, consuming and cataclysmic as breakups tend to feel. It’s not the end of the world, but in a way it is.“

He added, “I was actually looking at breakup movies when I came up with Midsommar. It’s how I view this film, like a fairy-tale breakup movie.” With this perspective in mind, the rituals, the violence, even the cult itself, all become secondary to Dani’s harrowing journey. The Hårga don’t function as antagonists. Instead, they offer Dani something she is deprived of throughout the entire film — validation.

Twisted as it is, it’s the first time she’s ever truly seen, but that same isolation makes her the perfect candidate to join the Hårga’s cult. By the time Midsommar reaches its final moments, Christian’s death isn’t just a shocking ending — it becomes symbolic and embodies the destruction of a relationship that was already dead.

Dani’s final, erratic smile, often reads as a descent into madness, but it plays just as convincingly as an emotional release, turning Midsommar into a cathartic, if deeply unsettling, breakup. Midsommar‘s familiarity is what makes it stick. Beneath the violence and gore is a story about emotional isolation and staying in a relationship long after it’s stopped working.

It’s also the story of a woman desperate to feel seen by the people she loves, and choosing the wrong place to find acceptance. Midsommar is disturbing because, at its core, the story is profoundly recognizable. And that is something harder to shake than any traditional horror ending about monsters and paranormal fiends.

Release Date

July 3, 2019

Runtime

147 minutes