Horror movie Midsommar has been announced as a late addition to the 2019 New Zealand International Film Festival.
It's the follow-up to acclaimed 2018 film Hereditary from filmmaker Ari Aster and will play on Sunday, August 4 during the Auckland leg of the festival.
Midsommar follows a couple who travels to Sweden to visit a rural hometown's 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.
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Popular YouTube account Looper has proclaimed Midsommar the "the scariest movie of 2019", and many critics agree.
"A virtuoso, bone-shaking, head-spinning experience that demands to be seen on the big screen, Midsommar is the horror movie to beat in 2019," writes Nick De Semlyen of Empire.
"It's a thoroughly enjoyable film, a crescendo of paranoid trippiness building to an uproarious gross-out in its final moments," writes Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian.
"Aster, it can't be denied, possesses an almost supernatural command of dread. He knows how to hold a shot just long enough to create pinpricks of discomfort, to disorient with an abrupt cutaway, to drop stomachs with the godlike perch and glare of his camera," writes AA Dowd of the AV Club.
"Midsommar is frankly stunning in where it's willing to go - and where its characters are willing to go in search of catharsis."
More information on Midsommar's festival screenings is available on the 2019 NZ International Film Festival website.
Newshub.
