The masterpiece tease

Ari Aster is a tease.

In parts of Hereditary (which I’ve seen twice) and Midsommar (which I just saw for the first time on Wednesday), he announces himself as a new master of horror, a stylist capable of a true masterpiece.

But it’s all just a tease. In fact, Aster’s in danger of becoming a one trick pony, a horror Guy Ritchie, because his two films contain almost the exact same strengths and weaknesses, echoing each other in both plot and structure.

The strengths are magnificent. Like, truly jaw-dropping.

But the weaknesses …

First let me say that the first half of Midsommar is my favorite movie of the year. I won’t spoil anything substantive, even the thing that happens so early that most people are probably including it when they write plot synopses. (I’m not reviewing it so I don’t have to struggle with that particular dilemma.) The way that opening thing is handled is brilliant and haunting, and the movie’s greatness continues pretty much through to [that scene where those two people do that thing, you know what I’m talking about – the 72-year-olds]. The shot over the car that goes upside down is probably my favorite single cinematic moment so far this year.

But then …

Aster doesn’t know how to provide a satisfying ending to his movies, but it’s not because they are not endings. They don’t just stop in the middle of a scene, the kind of thing we saw in Martha Marcy May Marlene. They have a certain completeness to them, and yet they are not satisfying.

Part of the problem is that he goes on too long. Both of these movies are probably 20 minutes longer than they should be, than they need to be. And those 20 minutes are crucial in losing what has made the previous 90+ minutes so distinct and so disturbing, turning them instead into something unintentionally comic. And I do really believe it’s unintentional, though whether that’s better or worse I don’t know.

The thing Aster truly has mastery of is grief. In both films he captures the absolute soul-wrenching horror of trauma through the performances of his female leads, Toni Collette and Frances Pugh. (Pugh, by the way, is fast becoming one of my favorite actresses … she has a kind of empathy that’s disarming, and is appropriate for the themes of this film.) The traumas portrayed truly are awful, and the reactions to them are pitch perfect. Aster somehow makes you scared at the intensity of a person’s grief. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that in a movie before, and yet I’ve seen it in both of Aster’s movies.

He explores the byproducts of that grief expertly. The schisms in a family. The recriminations. The depression. The way guilt and depression actually make you apologetic to the people who should be apologizing to you. The fragility of not knowing what you might lose next, who might leave you next. It’s all in there and it’s all true.

Aster (correctly) realizes he needs to include actual genre horror elements in the films as well, blood and guts and jump scares (a few) and moments of slow dread. They are horror movies, after all. But he gets everything just right in those until he opens the bag of tricks too far and too many thing spill out. Most of those extra things spill out in the last 20 minutes of the film that should never have been.

When I reviewed Hereditary I concluded by saying “[Aster] should be delivering plenty of other films that stick in our consciousness as he blossoms and matures.” I guess one year is too soon to say he’s done that yet. But I kind of wish he could have made Midsommar when he’d already gotten there. So much of Midsommar speaks to a particular part of my cinephile lizard brain that it leaves me with an inevitable sense of what it could have truly been, and therefore, a sense of disappointment. A four-star disappointment, but a disappointment nonetheless.

Ari Aster will stop teasing us, one day, I think. I just hope he hasn’t used up all his best ideas before he gets there.