Midsommar

Midsommar — Ari Aster's Screenplay as a Reading Object

This is the A24 × MACK edition of Ari Aster's Midsommar screenplay — a 300-page embossed hardcover that does not simply reproduce the script but reconstitutes the film as a text to be read at length. The book belongs to the A24 Screenplay Collection, co-published with MACK Books, and is formatted as a substantial object: 20.3 × 28 cm, with the weight and presence that implies.

What distinguishes Midsommar as a film — and what the book makes newly legible — is its structural displacement of grief. The film follows a collapsing relationship drawn into a rural Swedish midsummer festival, where communal ritual and emotional fracture are not contrasted but fused. On the page, the architecture of that fusion becomes traceable: the pacing of ceremony, the pressure of ordered surfaces, the tonal precision with which Aster constructs dread from daylight and floral symmetry rather than darkness.

The edition is built around the screenplay but extends well beyond it. Park Chan-wook contributes an introduction that positions the film from outside its own frame. Matthew Engelke, an anthropologist, provides an essay that addresses the film's ritual logic on its own disciplinary terms. Jessika Kenney contributes an illustrated Hårga choral primer — a document of the film's invented musical culture that functions as both annotation and artifact.

Together, these materials constitute a document of the film's inner logic rather than a commemorative object. The book sits within the broader field of Film Books & Film Culture — publications that treat cinema as a subject for sustained reading rather than passive consumption.

The physical edition is an embossed hardcover measuring 20.3 × 28 cm across 300 pages. ISBN: 978-1-960078-01-8.