Florence Pugh gives her 'different' view on Midsommar's unforgettable ending

Florence Pugh has revealed she has a "different version" of events compared to Midsommar director Ari Aster on how the horror film ended.

Just in case you haven't seen it by now, there are spoilers below...

The 28-year-old played protagonist Dani whose parents had just passed away and she decides to join her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends on a trip to rural Sweden where they stayed at a friend's ancestral commune.

However, we soon learn it's not quite a blissful retreat but rather a pagan cult as things take a turn where each person from the friend group is killed by the cult members.

Dani is chosen as the cult's "May Queen" and then gets to choose Christian as the last sacrifice. He's then involved in a ritual which sees him stuffed into a disembowelled bear's body and placed in a wooden temple with the other sacrifices and the temple is set on fire.

The final scene provides one of the iconic images from the film where Dani sobs as she looks on at the blaze, but this slowly turns into a smile.

During a recent interview with Wired, alongside Andrew Garfield to promote their new movie We Live In Time, Pugh shared how her take on the ending diverges from Aster's.

“The idea is that she’s now gone through a psychotic break. From the moment she chooses – I believe accidentally – Christian, her boyfriend, to get burnt, she keeps on waking up [from] and going back into this psychotic break," Pugh said.

“When the end happens, where everything is going up in flames, I tried to embody what I was like when I was five on Bonfire Night. And just how exciting it was to see flames, and I wanted to revert back to a very small and simple life of how simple things made, and make, children feel. Because in that moment, I presumed she wasn’t there anymore.”

So how does Aster's view differ from Pugh's?

Back in 2019, Aster described to Entertainment Tonight how the film's ending was "a perverse wish fulfilment, a fantasy that was playing with a kind of catharsis that I hope people will have to wrestle with".

The director added: "I hope it will also have people cheering and then maybe hopefully later on contending with that a little bit more."

We Live In Time is out in cinemas on January 1 2025.

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