Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

Milly Shapiro, Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff in Hereditary

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Woff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Mallory Bechtel. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Grace Yun. Film editing: Lucian Johnston, Jennifer Lame. Music: Colin Stetson.

There are films that leave a depressive miasma with me for days. I'm thinking particularly of George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988, not the 1993 American remake) and Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997, not the 2007 American remake). For a time, I thought Ari Aster's Hereditary was going to have the same effect on me, and it might have, if it hadn't devolved into a mere gory supernatural thriller with an overcomplicated backstory. It begins extraordinarily and creepily well, with a pan through the miniatures created by Annie (Toni Collette) in which one of them turns into the actual room where her son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is oversleeping on the day of his grandmother's funeral. A menacing gloom remains in the film as the family, including father Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), goes to the funeral and returns home. Even when we come home, there's a sense that something is off about the family and their obvious mixed feelings about the deceased. Ari Aster, in his feature film debut, skillfully handles the atmosphere in the somewhat sinister old house (aided by Pawel Pogorzelski's dark but not too dark cinematography and Colin Stetson's ominous score). Aster manages to gradually introduce the exposition about what's eating at Annie and her family. The performances are marvelous, especially Shapiro's obviously but enigmatically disturbed 13-year-old Charlie. I was with Aster's film all the way through the appalling accident that turns the story in a new direction. Then Ann Dowd, a fine actress whose career seems to have become defined by her performance as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale, shows up to reveal the movie's indebtedness to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Unfortunately, Aster's film has neither the coherence of the former nor the wit of the latter. In the end, it has to be remembered for Collette's performance, which should have had an Oscar nomination, not just for Annie's distraught moments but also the one at the film's climax when her face turns from horror to a kind of pleased amazement.

Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019)

Cast: Florence Pugh, Jack Reynor, Vilhelm Blomgren, William Jackson Harper, Will Poulter, Ellora Torchia, Archie Madekwe, Henrik Norlén, Gunnel Fred, Isabelle Grill. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Henrik Svenson. Film editing: Lucian Johnston. Music: The Haxan Cloak.

Too many makers of films and TV series -- I'm thinking of a particular example, HBO's series The Outsider -- seem to think that scary things happen only in the dark. I'm getting a little tired of squinting these old eyes at bad things happening in the murk on the screen. Ari Aster seems to know what I'm talking about: that weirdness happens in sunlight, too. Though Midsommar begins in gloomycam darkness, including the terrible thing that marks the life of Florence Pugh's character, Dani, a university student majoring in psychology, the film switches refreshingly to the open air and sunlight of Sweden in midsummer, when the sun never really sets. But of course this is where the really weird things happen. Midsommar was a solid commercial and critical success, even though it's really based on an old trope: people too smart for their own good fall foul of ancient rituals and practices. The American grad students who accompany Dani, still suffering from the event that wiped out her family, are a brainy but naïve lot:  Dani's somewhat distant boyfriend, Christian (Jack Raynor), his fellow grad student in cultural anthropology, Josh (William Jackson Harper), and their friend Mark (Will Poulter). They have been invited by their Swedish friend, Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), to see the midsummer rituals in his home community. It's clear that Dani and Christian are having relationship problems after the trauma of her recent loss, and it's also clear that Pelle is more than a little attracted to Dani. All of this will work itself out over the course of their visit to Sweden. Yes, horrible things will happen -- it's a horror movie, after all. But the film is made more creepy than startling by the sunny context. Even though they may manifest themselves in blood and pain, the real horrors in life are internal ones, Aster seems to be suggesting. As a director of horror movies, he has more in common with Ingmar Bergman than with schockmeisters like Eli Roth.