The Director's Cut of Midsommar is substantially worse than the theatrical cut

In my experience, director's cuts are almost always better, being a cleaner vision of the mind behind the film, but Midsommar's DC fails to stick the landing.

The horror of Midsommar, really, is the way Dani is seduced by the cult to kill Christian. Dani is unhappy in her life and relationship, traumabonded to a partner who is noncommital and emotionally unavailable.

The cult seems to offer her everything missing in her life; family, stability, genuine empathy, nevermind that it's built on eugenics and totalitarian control. The cult is fascist, but it's also beautiful and enchanting.

Christian is a bad boyfriend, but the way and degree to which he's a bad boyfriend is the needle that the movie needs to thread to work. In the theatrical cut, Christian is a coward who stays with Dani out of fear of regretting leaving her. He doesn't love Dani, and as such is not there for Dani emotionally. He's not a terrible guy, he's a bad boyfriend in pretty banal ways where the correct move for Dani is to dump him. In the director's cut, almost all the additional material serves to make Christian manipulative and abusive. Exchanges where Christian was originally simply emotionally unavailable turn into situations of outright abuse, with Christian chastising Dani for her trauma. This change fundementally alters the ending.

In the theatrical cut, Dani, seduced by fascism as an answer to her problems, commits an atrocity. She sends a kinda bad boyfriend to be burned alive.

In the director's cut, Dani kills an abuser with the help of a fascist cult. The cult is still fascist. They're still controlling its members reproductive habits, engaging in eugenics and purging the weak, but now they're helping an abused woman kill her abuser. This is just a way, way worse and less interesting ending than one in which Christian clearly doesn't deserve what he gets.

Submitted October 05, 2023 at 02:06AM by Cymbal_Monkey https://ift.tt/tdi35mh