Midsommar director's cut vs theatrical: the added 23 minutes settle the one argument fans still have about Dani's ending
Ari Aster released a longer version of Midsommar six weeks after the theatrical run, and it is not a bonus-features edition. Here's what the restored footage contains and how it changes the reading of the final scene.
Two versions of Midsommar exist, and the second one landed while people were still arguing about the first. The restored material is aimed almost entirely at one relationship.
The theatrical cut runs 147 minutes and opened wide in the US on 3 July 2019. The director's cut runs 171, premiered at the Film Society of Lincoln Center on 20 August 2019, played a limited run from 29 August, went to Apple TV in September and to Blu-ray the following July. A24 put it back in IMAX on the summer solstice in June 2024. It is the same film with a different center of gravity.
What goes back in
- The invitation — Christian explicitly asks Dani to come to Sweden. The theatrical cut plays it as Dani inviting herself, which makes her the imposition; the longer cut makes him the one who set the trap and then resented it.
- The lake argument — a nighttime confrontation in which Dani asks whether Christian still loves her, and he tells her that her kindness makes him feel indebted. Aster calls this the centerpiece of the version.
- A second ritual — a night water ceremony involving a boy dressed as a tree, which supplies the missing context for how Connie dies off screen.
- Pelle's hand — a line in the car about Josh already being brainwashed when Pelle found him, which converts Pelle from a homesick friend into a recruiter working a list.
- "Welcome home" — a Hårga resident says it to Dani on arrival, long before she has any reason to hear it as an offer.
- Housekeeping — the lunch table seated in the shape of a rune, more of Christian's thesis interviews, an extended confrontation with Josh after the ättestupan, and a birthday text to Dani from a friend back home.
The argument it settles
The long-running dispute about the last shot is whether Dani's smile is liberation or capture. The theatrical cut leaves that genuinely open, because Christian is a mediocre boyfriend rather than a malicious one and the Hårga read as a projection of what Dani needs.
The longer version tips both scales at once. Christian gets worse — more gaslighting, more calculated passivity — which makes the burning feel earned. Pelle gets worse too, which makes the community look less like a refuge and more like a recruitment operation that identified a grieving woman and worked her for a year. The smile stays. What changes is that you can now see exactly who arranged the conditions for it, and it isn't Dani.
"I absolutely wanted it to feel cathartic… But I hope the catharsis you feel when you're watching is unmuddied, but then as you walk away, it becomes more complicated," Aster told Bloody Disgusting in 2019.
He has also described the film flatly as a horror movie about codependency, which is a sentence the director's cut earns considerably more than the theatrical one does.
Read more: DC fans asked James Gunn for a director's cut of Superman. He says they have already seen it
Which one to watch
The theatrical cut is the better-paced film and the better first viewing; the ättestupan lands harder when the movie hasn't already spent twenty minutes on marital attrition. The director's cut is the better second viewing and the better version of the argument.
Aster has been open that the longer cut is self-indulgent and that he made it anyway, because there were things that were very painful to cut.
For the record: Midsommar cost $9 million and took $48 million worldwide. The director's cut exists because Aster kept telling people one would, and then had to go make it.