“My name is Ari Aster, and I am the writer and director of “Midsommar.” This scene directly succeeds a scene in which our protagonist, Dani, played by Florence Pugh, is pressured into taking mushrooms. She recently suffered a very, very serious loss and is probably not in the best place to take psychotropic drugs.” “Can you feel that, the energy coming up from the earth?” “A big challenge that we took on in this film was putting the spectator into the experience of somebody going through a mushroom trip. This is the first scene that kind of introduces psychedelic elements in the film that will be more prevalent later on.” “Look, the trees too, they’re breathing.” “There’s a lot of sound design work here that’s also helping bring us into her subjectivity. When she looks up at the tree, we notice that the tree now seems to be bending and warping, that the texture seems to be moving. As I was working with the visual-effects artists on these shots, we managed to experiment a lot and find what was too much and what was not enough.” “You guys are like my family.” “I would say that some of these shots we had 80 versions of. And then when she stands up, Dani is thrown instantly into a bad trip.” “I’m going to go for a walk.” “And from here we kind of enter this negative vortex — “ “No, no, no, no. Don’t think that. You’re fine. It’s almost your birthday.” “ — where we start playing with facial warping, warping expressions. This effect was especially difficult to accomplish, and so a big part of my job and the job of my editorial team was actually to be merciless in the way we watched these effects as they came in — “They were laughing at me.” “ — to see if there were any effects in the background that jumped too suddenly or where the effect feels especially digital.” “You want to come meet my friends?” “Thank you, I’m — “ “The tripping effect for the background is more pronounced at the very end of the shot than anywhere else in the film. So the disorientation that the viewer might feel at this moment is more extreme than they will feel again.”