Ari Aster and The Horror of Grieving
Love him or hate him, Ari Aster has quickly made a name for himself in horror. In two short years, he released two of most talked about films in recent years. He broke the rules of horror to create a conversation about what defines terror in cinema.
As I’ve discussed here before, I hated Hereditary and loved Midsommar. It’s a conflict that I have a difficult time reconciling in my own mind. The two films are much more similar than they are different. They feature shocking violence, phenomenal acting, brilliant production design, and swing for the fences ensemble horror staging that is equal parts absurd and effective.
Most importantly, the films confront human grieving as a source of unimaginable horror. It’s not a new idea, but it’s one that’s weaponized against the psyche by Aster. It’s also the shared trait that most influences my polar responses to his two films.
In Midsommar, Dani is engulfed in grief. The opening sequence has her find her entire family dead from asphyxiation, victims of her sister’s death by suicide in the family home. The image haunts her for months, nearly destroying her relationship with her long-time boyfriend Christian. Everything reminds her of her loss, and no one helps her cope with it.
By the time she joins her boyfriend’s excursion to the remote village for the Midsommar festival, she’s desperate for change. For all the murder, mayhem, and cult activities Midsommar is known for, the driving force of this village is community. These people support each other. They carry the burden for each other. If one person grieves, they all grieve. For the first time since losing her family, Dani is surrounded by people who actually understand the need to work through problems together and care for each other. They don’t murder, they sacrifice, and they ask nothing of anyone else they wouldn’t offer of themselves.
Hereditary also deals with grief. The film opens after the funeral of the abusive grandmother. The first act goes by and we’re hit with the moment I described as betraying the trust between the filmmaker and the audience. Annie has now lost her mother and her daughter within days of each other; this is more tragic to Annie as she worked very hard to stop her mother from abusing her daughter, and now it feels like her mother finally won control.
The rest of the plot builds from Annie’s attempts to get through her grief. She joins a support group. The support group leads her to a ritual that allows her to communicate with her daughter. Her life is obsessed with everything she can do to stop the pain of losing her child at the expense of everyone else in her life. She refuses to acknowledge what she’s doing to everyone around her until it’s too late to save them all.
Ari Aster’s horror films do not have hope. They do not truck in hope. They do not believe in hope.
What they do trade in is potential. Midsommar and Hereditary are destructive horror films with high body counts and plenty of violence. The big difference is Midsommar offers a path forward, where Hereditary offers a dead end.
Dani has a chance to express her grief in a community that will support its own. We know that the village has horrible plans for Dani and her friends, yet they accept them with open arms and bring them into society. There is a path here that could maybe one day not lead to happiness, but contentment.
Annie shuts down when her daughter dies. There is no way to restart her humanity. The more she does to fix her world, the more damage she creates. Her only way to move forward is to stop, but she never will. Her world is broken and she’s convinced she can fix it; she cannot, and nothing will save her from destroying herself.
I can deal with dark horror. I can deal with films that take a bleak tone. I can deal with self-destructive and utterly unlikeable characters. I struggle to deal with a director punishing his cast every step of the way just because he can.
Hereditary is hard for me to watch because Aster’s goal was to make everyone feel shocked and miserable. He takes a transgressive approach to horror tropes just to push the envelope and make the audience have a strong reaction. It’s far more manipulative than horror typically is and a softer hand could have been even more devastating.
Midsommar does start in that same artistic place. I’ll be perfectly honest. I almost walked out of Midsommar in the first 10 minutes. The death by suicide scene is shot in the same style as the car scene in Hereditary, down to repeated long close-ups of the body to make the audience squirm.
The film takes a turn when Dani agrees to travel, a much more active and healthy choice than Annie makes in the entirety of Hereditary. Dani makes an attempt to get past her grief by putting actual distance between her and the tragedy. She’s rewarded with a large community of strangers who welcome her, care for her, provide for her, and accept her for who she is. Quite literally, when she cries, they cry. When she asks questions, they answer. When she participates, they guide her. There will be tragedy, but there is the hope of progress.
It’s hard to call Midsommar an optimistic film, but at least it’s not as unrelenting and bleak as Hereditary.
Midsommar and Hereditary are available to stream on Amazon Prime.
