Ari Aster

(Amazon Streaming, December 2020) The good news is that, compared to writer-director Ari Aster’s previous Hereditary, I wasn’t actively wishing for all characters in Midsommar to die horribly as soon as possible. The bad news is that I wasn’t really opposed to their deaths either. Considering that the film is folk horror and my distaste for that subgenre is particularly well documented, at least I’m being consistent. What’s less subjective, however, is the film’s ludicrously overlong 147 minutes for a story that could have been told far more crisply. At this point, I’m growing increasingly certain that I just don’t like Aster’s approach to horror, period. His self-indulgent style seems custom-made to wow critics more than audiences, and the way he courts the “elevated horror” crowd (which is probably a dead-end) is almost antithetical to the way the horror genre has evolved for decades. Also: internalized misandry, once again. But hey – Midsommar is daytime folk horror in which a deplorable person gets to kill her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend with impunity. You kids go nuts if that’s what you want to see.

(Netflix Streaming, April 2019) Look, I’m certainly aware of Hereditary’s enthusiastic critical reception, and I can even see why it earned such rave reviews. It’s an uncompromising, hard-hitting horror film that gets many of its ideas and gravitas from dramas about grieving families, then cranks up the weirdness quotient until it becomes a full-blown nightmare of occult horror, with plenty of gore to go around. From a structural perspective, it plays masterfully (if unusually) with foreboding elements of dread, creating creepy and sharper-than-average visuals. Terrifyingly wrong images and sequences make the film hard to watch even for jaded horror fans, and there’s no denying writer-director Ari Aster’s skills in bringing all of these elements together. It’s the kind of horror film that highbrow fans of the genre would like to see more often, so clearly does it have more ambitious goals than the usual monster of the week. The thing is: I don’t care, because I disliked the characters from the get-go. I found them so irritating that wanted all of them to die, and I suppose I got my wish by the end of the film. The film felt like nails scratching on a blackboard all the way through. I will acknowledge the possibility that Hereditary is simply too horrific to be liked—at a time when most “horror” films are weak repetitive material that can be dispatched with rolled eyes and a shrug, this is one film that isn’t afraid to be too horrifying for its own good, killing off an entire family to make a point. And it’s not as if horror films have any duty to be likable. Still, my point remains: I don’t like Hereditary. And I can’t bring myself to recommend it on the same level as I was enthusiastic about such recent contemporaries at The Babadook or Get Out.