Look, it’s undeniable: Christian sucks. He is a hulking embodiment of white American male entitlement, and Reynor plays him with fine, knowing calibration, like a Seth Rogen from hell. “You’re an American,” one character says at one point, “just jam yourself in there,” and Christian spends much of the movie doing just that. Across Midsommar’s two-hour-plus run time, we see Christian repeatedly deny Dani’s emotions, steal another student’s thesis, speak insensitively of Dani’s mentally ill sister, pressure Dani to take hallucinogenic drugs when she’s sure she’ll have a bad trip (one of the gravest of all party fouls!), talk about her incessantly behind her back, and all other manner of what we might in the modern parlance (in which this movie is definitely fluent) call “microaggressions.” Like his more humorously awful friend Josh, Christian is a closely observed avatar representing the worst parts of modern American masculinity, and the film finds a wicked delight in the moments when things finally stop going his way.

But is he so terrible that we want to see him die? And not just die, but be drugged into oblivion and lured into a questionably consensual sexual encounter, placed inside the still-warm carcass of a grizzly bear, and burned to death in an excruciatingly slow-paced public pagan sacrifice? Even for a garden variety shithead, that’s a bit much. Aster himself has admitted that Christian isn’t the worst guy, and he’s “decent enough that he doesn’t leave” Dani after her parents and sister die. In the end, as he endures indignity upon indignity, I could imagine the audience’s sympathy slipping dangerously in his direction.