Effective But Derivative

Rating: 7/10 (13 June 2018)

Younger people may find the film slow, as pace is secondary to mood, here. And mood can best be described as bleakAF. Every frame is filled with dread. So much so that the film lacks a sense of the flowing nature of normal life. The characters aren't people you'd want to have over to dinner, and although the acting is top notch, it's a family of folks at the bottom rungs of their family (attic) ladder. And it's super yucky to drop into their world for 2 hours.
Although creating a relentlessly grim & grimy tone which infuses the film with a near sleep-walking texture of story telling, Aster does a nice job of inserting a few shocker moments and tense dramatic confrontations along the way, keeping the narrative interesting, and the music is effective, so his film is never less than compelling to watch.
But in the end, that's not really enough, and it's a reach for me to give this movie a 7 (I seriously considered 5), mostly because there's very little here that's original. The ending borrows heavily from films like Rosemary's Baby, Wicker Man and (more recently) Kill List, and middle parts conjure up Insidious meets The Conjuring. Even the mother's miniature house models are an idea snatched from Beetlejuice.
It's a nice little mash up of horror tales of yesteryear by Ari Aster, but horror and mystery are uniquely effective only when they are original, and originality is hard to come by. You won't find it here.
PS Someone needs to tell these new-fab creators of modern horror that its perfectly ok for horror film characters, and their viewing audiences, to laugh once in a while, you know, in between all the incantations and severed heads.