Director Spotlight: Guilt, Gaslighting, and Giant Genitalia: The Films of Ari Aster

 

Hereditary (2018)

You know, Annie, you can always build a shrine to all the terrible things in the world, but it doesn't mean that you have to destroy anything that is good.

Ari Aster hints at the thematic underpinnings of Hereditary with the opening shot; panning from a seemingly innocuous treehouse to a slow zoom in on dollhouse that seamlessly transitions to a scene in a bedroom in the real house. Right away, it establishes that the family in question is being controlled by an outside force, not unlike the tiny figures that are placed into the dollhouse. The question is who or what is controlling them, and what is the purpose? 

They seem normal on the surface: husband and wife Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and Annie (Toni Collette) and their two children Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Molly Shapiro) form the nuclear family. Annie is an artist who specializes in miniatures, but the death of her mother Ellen throws her for a loop. Her relationship with Ellen was strained until the birth of Charlie, at which time Ellen seemed to take special interest in her welfare. 

Grief plays an important part in Hereditary, and also crops up a lot in Aster’s later films. There is a concept known as ancestral memory, or genetic memory, in which it’s theorized that memories, behaviors, or traits can be passed down through generations. Whether or not that’s actually true, and it has been highly contested by the scientific community at large, perhaps on a smaller scale, strong emotional reactions can be passed down through families, held on to, and propagated, and perhaps taken advantage of by nefarious forces.

When tragedy strikes, a rift is opened up between Peter and Annie, because though she loves her son, she cannot quell her hate for the death he inadvertently caused. The rift is the opening needed for evil to seep in and insert its dark tentacles. Hereditary isn’t scary because of what is happening right in front of us, it’s the peripheral that is frightening; something moves in the corner of our eye, an interaction doesn’t seem quite right, things are falling too neatly into place. Aster is painting his picture with pure dread, and as everything starts to spiral towards the darkness we realize at the same time as the characters that we never had control from the beginning.

Midsommar (2019) 

Horror films thrive in the darkness because it's easy to exploit our fear of the unknown and the void. It's much harder to maintain a frightening atmosphere in the daytime as naturally, it's when people feel the safest. Ari Aster proves with his newest film Midsommar that an idyllic sunny location can be one of the most terrifying places on earth.

The set-up for Midsommar is simple: a group of college-aged young adults want to take a trip to their friend's rural hometown in Sweden to partake in a nine day pagan festival that only occurs every ninety years. Most of the narrative focuses on one particular couple in the group, Dani (Florance Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor). After experiencing a major tragedy in her life Dani is going through the stages of grief, but has trouble coping and connecting to Christian who is emotionally distant. This troubled relationship serves as the backbone to the entire film.

Upon reaching the village the group discovers a gorgeous community filled with bright colorful foliage and seemingly welcoming folk. They are invited to take part in increasingly bizarre rituals and it is at that point the film takes off and never looks back. Comparisons will inevitably be made to The Wicker Man (1973) (with shades of Shirley Jackson's haunting story The Lottery) and on a surface level they share similarities, but on a subtextual level they differ greatly. This is at its core a movie about the disintegration of a relationship and the way people internalize grief. Dani (like a lot of women) is constantly being chastised for showing negative emotions, accused of being hysterical, and generally undermined by her peers. As disturbing as the events of Midsommar are, the underlying theme of the film is actually quite wholesome--find the strength to do what makes you happy.

Midsommar isn't just a film that takes place in the daylight, the lighting in the film is overexposed, giving everything a blinding white hue. It's a very unique look and the contrast between the clean white aesthetic and the incredibly gruesome sequences is jarring. There are also some jaunts into surreal imagery as well. A majority of the cult rituals are presented with no explanation and minimal exposition though there are a lot of visual cues to help the more astute viewer piece things together. The framing and camera work is creative and effective and Aster isn't afraid to move the viewpoint around to strange angles. He uses unique scene transitions (he's particularly fond of the smash cut) and there are some truly breathtaking shots--especially in the third act. The score, provided by The Haxan Cloak, is fantastic with dark ambient pieces mixed with happy folksy music. The sound design is incredible and it adds to the foreboding feel immensely. Occasionally joyful music will slowly morph into atonal noise and there are also some intense scenes that utilize silence to great effect. 

The tone changes oscillating between darkly funny dialogue and harrowing set-pieces. Aster handles this tone switching masterfully, and it serves as an interesting alternative to traditional jump scares. This movie is drenched in dread and it permeates every scene. It's more unsettling than outright scary, but when all hell breaks loose there's no stopping the momentum. 

Midsommar is a mind-blowing trip into complete lunacy that hides a positive message about empathy and self-actualization. Come dance with abandon and enjoy basking in the sun. Midsommar is here!

Beau is Afraid (2023) 

Ari Aster is obsessed with fucked up families. In Hereditary (2018), he focused on generational trauma. He followed that up with Midsommer (2019), a folk-horror-style film about cults and how they can prey on people by pretending to be the family they miss. Even his earlier work, like the 2011 short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, explores toxic familial dynamics. The man cannot seem to pull himself away from digging his cinematic finger into gaping emotional wounds, tearing them open for everyone to see.

In Beau is Afraid, Aster has his sights on a single man, middle-aged Beau Wassermann (Joaquin Phoenix). Beau lives by himself in a shabby apartment in the seedy part of an unnamed city. He is riddled with anxiety and spends his day nervously navigating his errands, running for his life from place to place, and avoiding contact with other people if he can help it. In between his constant battle with fight-or-flight, Beau visits his psychiatrist (Stephen McKinley Henderson) to discuss his relationship with his mother and his various fears.

Right away, it's apparent that the universe that Beau resides in is a surreal exaggeration of the real world. The streets are full of naked homeless people murdering each other in plain sight; a man with heavy body modification chases Beau in front of his apartment every day on a schedule. The news has headlines like "Bad Stabby Man Stabs People," and every wall is adorned with perverse graffiti and hastily scrawled cocks. It is simultaneously over-the-top but strangely familiar: only one or two shades brighter than the world we currently exist in. It could be that it is our world, and Beau's anxiety warps it into the depraved view the audience sees.

As the cherry on top of the generalized anxiety sundae, Beau has to go home to visit his mother. His mother lays on the guilt trips hot and heavy, and Beau dreads the journey with every fiber of his being. Unfortunately, he also has the worst luck of all time, and a series of terrible events puts roadblocks in the way of his trip. These events spur an adventure, where Beau has to make his way through various situations to make it home finally. The film is divided into several chapters, each with its own characters and aesthetic, in which Beau has to navigate both his and others' neurosis. Phoenix does a fantastic job selling Beau's frantic apprehensiveness and need to please everyone, but he's always good with dark horse type characters.

Each chapter focuses on a different idea: addiction to prescription drugs and the death of the American dream in a quiet suburb, a take on A Midsummer Night's Dream with a traveling play troupe, an homage to the stylized kabuki storybook look of The Ballad of Narayama (1958), finally ending on a Mommy Dearest (1981) horror show. Throughout all this, Aster's dark humor pops up consistently but never when you expect it to, casually winking at the audience. Aster isn't taking this seriously, and he doesn't think you should be, either. At some points, he is channeling Alejandro Jodorowsky's penchant for Dadaist set pieces and surrealism.

The pacing is by far the worst aspect of the film, primarily because of the hills and valleys of each vignette. There are essentially four climaxes in the narrative, and after each one, it gets a bit harder to focus on the bigger picture entirely, and it gets increasingly muddled as more players are added. Thematically this could be on purpose to put the audience inside Beau's head, as his entire life is a chaotic horror show, but it can prove tedious at times. 

Beau is Afraid is a distinctive art piece full of idiosyncrasies and asides. It's like sorting through someone's smelly, dirty laundry piece by piece. Like all personal art, by its nature, it will not appeal to everyone, but those who resonate with it will find it endlessly fascinating.

—Michelle Kisner