My research is a natural extension of the answer that I’ve always given to the question of whether I prefer reading books or watching films: “I read films, too.” This research addresses how Ari Aster’s 2019 film Midsommar unravels the nature/culture dichotomy as a means of cultural criticism through a cultural-ecological approach. The term cultural ecology, when applied to texts as an interpretive method, indicates that there is a dialectic relationship between culture and nature, and it is within this relationship that literary or cinematic texts give symbolic responses to culture which transgresses, or regenerates, the culture in return. This research shows that Midsommar incentivises a critique of the patriarchal design of our modern culture and repression of the female forces through an analogy between the dichotomy of Cultural/Apollonic discourse and Natural/Dionysion forces, and the doomed relationship of the main characters drawing on the theoretical works of Hubert Zaph, Mikhail Bakhtin and Nietzsche. It signifies the importance of film reading in subverting the fossilised systems of language and thought within culture while empowering the marginalised and the culturally ostracised to become a transformative force within the cultural system.