Spoiler Warning: This essay includes important plot details about Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid.
The first feature from Ari Aster, Hereditary, lingers like a curse. Those who have seen it know the feeling. And the few who caught it without any forewarning won’t forget it. It puts a bottomless pit in your stomach. It becomes hard to breathe. The film’s conclusion is only comical in our desperate attempt to diffuse what we experienced. Some may have mustered a laugh. Most sat wide-eyed with gaped jaws or pursed lips.
You don’t need to look further than Aster’s short film career to spot his twisted talent. “The Strange Thing About the Johnsons” from 2011 hits nearly as hard as Hereditary with a third of the runtime. (Content warning: The short film depicts incest and sexual assault). It’s as if the short dares the audience to imagine a worse scenario in a dreadful domino effect.
A24 felt the piece warranted a contract. Today, Aster’s reputation is increasingly understood by cinephiles. Asking someone to watch an Aster flick translates to, “Do you want to feel really fucked up?” The director needs no other tagline — just a bit more context.
Aster isn’t a needless provocateur. His films don’t prod without cause. There are enough threads and throughlines between each movie to keep a conversation going for days. You could talk about:
- generational trauma
- toxic relationships
- deformity
- family
In doing so, you’d barely scratch the surface. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. Let’s take a step back and look at a concept that permeates all of his films thus far. Something that undeniably bounds all of us — life and death.
The Gut-Wrenching Grief of Hereditary
In the film’s second scene, Annie (Toni Collette) struggles to deliver a eulogy for her late mother. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), son Peter (Alex Wolff), and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) flank her. Annie admits her mom’s long-term distance and bizarre compulsion toward Charlie makes it difficult to find the right words, let alone feel anything.
Death casts a shadow over the family, but they mostly go on with their lives. Annie starts to recreate what few interactions she remembers with her mother through her art. One miniature set depicts her mother trying to breastfeed Charlie, even while Annie nurses the baby. Meanwhile, Steve brushes off a call from the funeral home about a desecrated grave.
It’s not long before death really bites down. At a party, Annie insists Peter brings Charlie too, and the latter has a severe allergic reaction to a cut cross-contaminated by chopped walnuts. Peter then accidentally decapitates Charlie on the drive to the hospital. Wracked with guilt, Peter lets Annie discover Charlie’s headless corpse the next morning.
This moment precedes Annie’s true downfall. Grief becomes an overwhelming force. At the next funeral, Annie’s emotionally unable to speak. Nothing is more palpable than this shock. The demonic presence backed by her mother’s secret cult is almost auxiliary.
Steve tries to pull her out of the spiral. Unfortunately, his emotional detachment renders him useless. His one defining action—refusing to humor Annie by destroying Charlie’s sketchbook—leaves him engulfed in flames. In other words, death compounds death. Annie is simply caught in its crosshairs.
She can’t move on, nor reconcile with Peter. Grief fuels her desperate search to find answers and solace around Charlie’s death. Instead, she finds Paimon, one of the eight kings of hell.
In Hereditary, death and grief mix into tar. It captures and suffocates those who fall into it. The more one writhes in it, the more it constricts them.
The Triumphant Catharsis of Midsommar
Aster’s 2019 outing is more than just a companion to Hereditary. The film goes further than the shock of death. It traces a process sometimes harder than experiencing grief itself: learning to live past it.
Dani (Florence Pugh), a grad student, is blindsided by her sister’s murder-suicide that also claims her parents. Her disengaged boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor), tries to consul her among his insufferable friends’ pleas to break up with Dani. The group tries to exclude her from a month-and-a-half-long trip to Sweden. But Christian reluctantly invites her to dodge yet another conflict.
A few shroom trips later, the tourists are unknowingly captive to a culture they only think they understand. After witnessing a 72-year-old couple’s joint — and communally celebrated — joint suicide, Dani is haunted again by her family’s demise.
Christian repeatedly brushes off her trauma as a nuisance. Instead, he focuses on stealing his peer’s graduate thesis. The cult, however, takes Dani’s sensitivity towards death as a sort of spiritual reverence. They insist she joins them as they gradually make sacrifices out of the other outsiders. Finding support, Dani wins a grueling contest around a maypole to become the cult’s May Queen.
Her victory doesn’t allow her to overcome grief quite yet, but it does spark a newfound purpose. Complete strangers find value in and applaud her existence. Dani walks by a smiling specter of her late mom as she’s hailed the May Queen. Later, when she discovers Christian at the center of a pagan sex ritual, she’s immediately comforted by her newfound sisters through a therapeutic screaming session.
Dani’s grief shifts to joy as she incinerates the only living source of her pain: Christian stuffed in a bear carcass. Given her family died in the cold dark of a winter night, it’s poetic that a summer day paired with a bellowing inferno melts her remaining sorrow. Aster shows Dani discover new life in Midsommar’s final display of death.
The Cruel and Comedic Mortality of Beau Is Afraid
There’s a lot going on in Beau Is Afraid. Structural similarities to Aster’s previous films are chucked out the window and then stabbed by a naked old man with a shiv. Death is more omnipresent in Beau — and mostly unnoticed by the cast of the perverse picture. The titular character, Beau (Joaquin Phoenix), stands alone as the only figure haunted by it.
The black comedy of errors can’t help but explore new and exciting worst-case scenarios. Beau is beaten, shanked, robbed, ridiculed, and humiliated endlessly on his way to his mother’s funeral, which he of course misses. On top of that, his earliest memories are of his mother telling him if he ever orgasms, he’ll die (allegedly) just like his father.
Beau’s grief isn’t attached to death, but to life itself. Here, Aster suggests living is dying. There’s no poetic justice or symbolic silver lining. Bad things simply happen. And they can always get worse.
One scene sees Beau’s apartment destroyed by what can be generously described as a feral group of John Waters rejects. Another shows Beau witnesses a teenage girl’s suicide after she calls him a homophobic slur. Eventually, Beau learns his dad is still alive and … uh … well?
Despite this, Beau‘s apathy has a purpose. By minimizing mortality and showing Beau desperately cling to normalcy, it paradoxically reminds us that life — even at its lowest point — isn’t defined by a perpetual cycle of grief. That would be truly absurd.
It could be easy to dismiss Aster as nihilistic. The sentiment isn’t that far off base. But like the novelist Cormac McCarthy, being doused in death through these films doesn’t desensitize us to life. Rather, Aster inspires us to cherish it more.
