Everything We Know about Ari Aster’s Hereditary Follow-up Midsommar So Far

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Director Ari Aster’s debut feature Hereditary wasn’t quite an It-level phenomenon at the box office, but with a $79 million gross it easily became the biggest moneymaker yet for A24, the indie film/TV production and distribution company behind such other critically acclaimed films as Ex Machina and The Witch. Part of that gross can be chalked up to marketing, as Hereditary received a big push as a film guaranteed to frighten and devastate audiences in equal measure. The other part of that gross can presumably be attributed to audience reaction: Hereditary, although somewhat divisive to the multiplex crowd, certainly got people talking. We’ll go ahead and admit it: Toni Collette’s tortured performance as Annie Graham certainly disturbed the hell out of us.

Like other directors who have made scintillating horror debuts in recent years (David Robert Mitchell, Jennifer Kent, Robert Eggers), the conversation immediately turned after the film to the obvious next step: What direction would Aster explore for his sophomore feature? That forthcoming film, tentatively (or permanently, it’s unclear) titled Midsommar, is already scheduled for an Aug. 9, 2019 release from A24, but the film’s production has been intriguingly shrouded in secrecy so far.

Here, then, is everything we know so far about Ari Aster’s Midsommar.

The Plot

We can’t help but think that some aspects of the setting and the vague synopsis we have of Midsommar will result in many film fans expecting a similar movie to Hereditary. As that film ultimately proved to revolve around a cult-like coven of witches, so too does Midsommar invoke some of the same influences, The Wicker Man most obvious among them. Here’s all we have so far in terms of an overall synopsis:

A couple travels to Sweden to visit their friend’s rural hometown for its fabled mid-summer festival. What begins as an idyllic retreat quickly devolves into an increasingly violent and bizarre competition at the hands of a pagan cult.

That synopsis certainly makes us think of The Wicker Man first, although this year’s Apostle on Netflix might be in the same sort of conceptual ballpark as well. Others have drawn comparison to films such as Ben Wheatley’s Kill List, a film that starts out seeming like a fairly standard crime drama before making a hard left turn into cult-centered horror in its third act. The same could possibly be said for Midsommar, as Aster has described it as an “apocalyptic breakup movie.”

Either way, it’s certainly still a horror film, or “Scandinavian folk horror,” to use Aster’s preferred expression. In a June interview about Hereditary with the Hollywood Reporter, he went a bit further, saying that Midsommar represented the last horror film he was planning on directing in the foreseeable future.

“That is the only other horror movie I have,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure that’s going to be it for a long time. I love the genre, I consider myself a genre filmmaker in that I want to play in every genre. I would love to make a musical. I have 10 other scripts that I’ve written that I want to make and there are other things I have. I’m writing a sci-fi film and there are at least four or five movies that I have ready to go that I am excited about making that I’d like to do in succession.”

So it’s probably safe to say that unless Midsommar is some kind of box office smash, we we’ll be seeing Aster dip a toe in some new genre waters afterward.