"Tomorrow’s a big day," says cult member Pelle to Dani of a ceremony in the festival of Midsommar.
To which leading lady Dani (Florence Pugh) replies: "Is it scary?"
What follows isn't exactly scary but it is downright nasty.
Midsommar follows a young American couple named Dani and Christian (Pugh and Jack Reynor). Dani has just dealt with an unimaginably grim and traumatic family event and now, as she attempts to recover, she finds her boyfriend still pulling away from her despite his support of her through the drama.
When Christian and his friends are revealed to be attending the Midsommar festival in the remote Swedish countryside, he feels obligated to ask Dani to join him.
Despite reservations, Dani goes with Christian to Sweden and finds an unimaginably bright and positive surrounding - until people start meeting some gruesome ends.
And that is just what Midsommar is - gruesome, traumatic, and tense.
However, if you class scary as being full of jump scares, total fright, and a pumping heart then you will probably find this not to be that scary at all.
It is visceral, shocking, depressing, and uncompromising in how harshly it treats its characters, but Midsommar is also satisfying and lacking in those all too obvious sudden surprises - beyond a couple of hallucinatory moments and a few mallet-whacks.
It's about being torn from the people you love and how susceptible a person is to an empathetic voice when at their most vulnerable, which feels all the more real than frightening ghouls jumping out at you with no warning.
If you cannot handle extreme gore, full-frontal nudity, or mutilation and unsettling uses of other people's skin, however, then you will be thoroughly put off.
Midsommar is not cheap scares, but it is a slow unwinding feeling of dread and a display of just how dark Ari Aster is willing to go without resorting to cheap tricks to produce unearned bodily reactions.
We will remind you, however, this film is rated 18 so it definitely earns its stripes in terms of explicit content, but you may, bizarrely, find it rather cathartic in the end.
Midsommar is in cinemas now.
