For me, 2 things come to mind; Berserk & the Long Walk
Berserk may sound controversial, but I just didn’t have a good time watching the 90’s anime. I felt angry while watching it. I just didn’t like the characters for how dickish they were (especially Guts & Casica) and the setting was too miserable for me. And some of you may go, “but the comic is 10x better” (I know it’s manga, I’m just calling a comic to piss of people) I also just don’t like dark fantasy in general, since they’re edgy, pretentious, and worst of all… they’re ugly. There’s a reason why I never played the Dark Souls games, outside of the difficulty
The Long Walk movie is really well made movie with amazing acting. But man was it a miserable movie to go through. Seeing all those kids getting shot by soldiers for being slower was painful to watch.
Side note: there’s a lot of critically acclaimed stuff I like (Cowboy Bebop & the Dark Knight). It’s just that entertainment is so subjective that it’s not mutually exclusive to writing.
Misommar was meh. Yes, it had a new and unusual aesthetic for a horror movie, but that’s about it. Cults prey on the weak and traumatized, we get it. I don’t remember there being much of a plot, just weirdness and violence for sake of weirdness and violence.
But then the bigger issue is all the ignorant people who start associating flower crowns and Nordic (and even Slavic) traditions with “just like Midsommar!!”. Same happened with Kazakhstan (" very naice!") and Eastern Europe (after “Hostel”)
For me that was enough. I think it’s fine for a movie to focus on doing one thing really well. Midsommar was memorable precisely because of it’s novel aesthetic, and the world created around it.