Mediocre Thriller Overhyped by the Critics

Rating: 6/10 (11 June 2018)

This is a solid entry level thriller by Ari Aster with tasteful nods to the quintessentials such as Rosemary's Baby and The Shining.
The story opens with Mom (Toni Collette), Dad (Gabriel Byrne), high school son (Alex Wolff), and 13-year-old daughter (Milly Chapiro) dealing with the death of Mom's mother, a domineering woman with a penchant for spellbooks whose absence is generally not missed. After a tragedy befalls this family, supernatural chaos ensues, mostly inside the family home, which of course is in an isolated wooded location.
The problem is that it's too slow of a burn, as Aster takes 80% of the movie to build up the suspense and then fails to deliver the anticipated thrills, shock, and awe in the last 20%. Very similar pacing and cliche haunted house tropes (doors opening and closing, candles blowing out, seances, etc.) as the awful Paranormal Activity series.
The gem of this film is unquestionably Collette. Her performance of a woman who transitions from anxious grieving daughter, to frenzied matriarch, to utter hysterical terror by the end of the movie, would be the only reason I would ever watch this again (but probably won't). A dinner scene where she releases 16 years of pent up verbal rage upon her family (and the way Wolff's character internalizes the painful things she says) is, admittedly, a very well shot and executed 5 minutes of cinema.
Sadly, that's where the good ends. The movie's score is nearly nonexistent and overdoes it with the moments of drawn out silence. Byne is wasted in this film as the secular skeptic, detached father who witnesses the supernatural phenomena firsthand, yet still refuses to believe his wife's assertions that some kind of apparitions are pursuing them with malcontent (due to her convenient history of mental illness). It's also not believable in the slightest how Wolff's character processes the tragedy, receives no therapy whatsoever after the tragedy occurs, or that any of the family members being victimized in the home never think to leave the home.
Giving this movie an R rating was a stretch. Giving it a 93% RT rating was an unforgivable overhype. Watch it once for Collette's performance and move on.