That the American tourists, magic mushroom tea-chugging stoners on a lark in Europe, suddenly sober and become earnest anthropologists fighting over the chance to write a thesis about the loony Wicker Man community they have come across in Sweden is a subplot going to a lot of trouble to justify why the group doesn't hightail it out of that lurid Teletubbie land at the first sight of a grizzly head hammering, in Ari Aster's again unrestrained short film idea-turned-into-a-near-three-hour horror slog that plays out, well, imagine the wicker totem being wheeled out at the twenty-minute mark and Edward Woodward suffering twisted rituals one-after-the-other for the final two hours - skinnings and sex rites and cliff dives and death ceremonies and bear disembowelments and pube pies and til-you-drop maypole dances - a convoluted and depraved mess which the stoners should be glad not to have to intellectualise in a thesis given it all seems to boil down to the minor question of whether one smiles through it or not.
★★★☆☆
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