Hello, it me, pretend film-programmer, here with a hypothetical triple feature built around Midsommar:
First, pair it with Climax as a 2019 double-feature of cinematic drug trips that deconstruct the stability of our conceptions of reality through blitzkrieging the audience’s sensory experience. The suffocating norms of “sane” behavior stifle the external expression needed to psychologically process the multitudinous insanity of existence. This interior-surface dissonance heightens the lunacy, further dragging us down the rabbit hole.
Then, pair Midsommar with The Other Story as a 2019 double-feature about how western individualism pushes victims to — and into — archaic lifestyles whose communalism, no matter how politically regressive, seemingly trumps the despair of purportedly-untraditional solipsism. And yet, we find the retrograde amongst the ostensibly progressive, and the progressive can be as old as human contact.
AKA (and this could be the thesis for the the entirety of the triple feature): evil’s everywhere, in all pockets of society — it just manifests outwardly in different ways, both overtly and insidiously, depending on one’s perspective.