Failure as a horror movie - disrespectful of serious mental illnesse

Rating: 4/10 (29 September 2018)

Were you wondering why I am wasting another two hours of my life to write this much, here it is. The bottom line impression is - disrespectful.
Disrespectful of all those undoubtedly talented people and their effort resulting in great acting, great photography, scenography, music, lightning.
Even worse, although I do believe it was unintentional, disrespectful of all those suffering from serious mental illness. No one with an ounce of personal experience, with their own or close family member issues of the sort, would have made such mistakes.
And the worst - comparing a mentally ill person to hell king?!?!? This is so so hurtful and offensive!

Thank God for all those people who don't have to know how dreadful the face of serious mental illness is. Enjoy your luck, be happy, feel grateful and humbled and, please, do not tempt your fate by presuming your artistic imagination is deep, mature, out of the box, intellectual enough to fully grasp the concept of real life pit-bottom darkness and agony of insanity.
I've read quite a few reviews here and was extremely surprised with both good and bad reviews. None of them pointed out enough or at all (?!?!!?) the core point of the whole story.
So, I am going to "reveal" that point right away: real life horror of mental illnesses especially hereditary ones.
The doom you cannot prevent, avoid or deflect in any way and can only helplessly sit and watch completely aware how it is slowly overtaking your mind and ruining yours and life of those you care most about. And yes, it is a true horror and hell on earth, but those two words are not to be used literally when depicting the said point. That is the problem with this movie.
Now, those of you in search of a real horror movie skip it - it won't quench your thirst. Horror here is just a brush used for painting a family tragedy. In the second part, a brush used badly and sadly...
While horror is a tempting way to express subject such as madness growing and developing in your head and in heads of your children and since it is in your genes it is your fault and on top of that you are mourning the death of your mother, whom you love of course but at the same time hate and blame for burdening you and your children with that terrible cross to bear - it requires a truly gifted artist and an exceptionally mature person to pull that off decently and stay away from failing bizarrely half way there.
The theme of the movie is so heavy, hard, serious, complex, like "A Brilliant Mind" times 3 and then add a horror layer to that. Very easy to go cheesy.
It would require like, you know, genetic splice between Ron Howard and Alfred Hitchcock... And Ari Aster obviously isn't anywhere near there, at least yet. It's exactly like when you ask a child what they want to be when they grow up and the answer is - Superman, and it's super cute they chose a selfless superhero but it ain't gonna happen. Bite more than you can chew.
Mental illness signs are all over from the very begging. Subtle ones at the funeral like Annie is wearing the same necklace as her dead mother meaning she is "in the club" not at all unaware of what's going on; creepy grinning blond guy and the woman putting something on the dead grandma's lips and however disturbingly strange that is nobody seems to notice or sees them at all except the granddaughter; words Annie uses in the eulogy to describe her mother (which, by the way, are not particularly flattering given the occasion) like suspicious, secretive, rituals, anxieties, completely disregarding other people's opinion and so on - overall leaving the impression of a paranoid person living in her own 'reality'; regarding her mother's character Annie even says "that explains me /Annie herself/" - again she is "in the club" and aware; something is obviously wrong with the granddaughter, her strange behaviour, creepy figurines she makes, at the funeral drawing her mother, Annie, as a shark toothed monster...
And then the major clue - group therapy. It is not actually a clue but totally straightforward literal explanation! Annie says it all. Her mother suffered from severe DID - Dissociative identity disorder, also known as multiple personality disorder (and none of the reviews I've read even mentioned that!!!), later on from dementia as well and towards the end lost it all together.
Her father suffered from psychotic depression and starved himself to death.
Her older brother had schizophrenia and hanged himself.
Annie herself was forced (!!!) to go to group therapy a couple a years ago. When they had their first child, a son, Annie's husband enforced a no contact rule regarding her mother which Annie, as it seems, gladly accepted. Grandma was reintroduced into their life when they had their second child, the above mentioned girl. It is obvious from the very first scene the girl was very close to her grandma but Annie refers to that as "she /grandma/ immediately stabbed her hooks into her /girl/". That actually means that the girl, unlike her brother, showed the signs of mental disorder early on and as such gravitated towards already gravely ill grandma who "understood" her unlike Annie who tries to enforce "normal" life upon her. Of course Annie is ridden with guilt for having a bad relationship with her mother, for passing the illness to her daughter, for being unstable herself, for ruining the life of her family. And so on and so forth.
I mean, come on, what more do you need to understand this movie is not really about ghosts, demons, cults, witch king?!?!?!? These horror elements are just a metaphor.
A bad, cheap but most of all unbelievably childish metaphor.
It's a pity though, the beginning of the movie was promising, while it was still just flirting with controlled amount of horror details, like chilling atmosphere, sense of something being wrong but not knowing exactly what, extreme stress and grief making people seeing or rather feeling things not actually there, freaky accident etc.
But, when the actual 'flesh and blood' horror kicked in... it became a hot mess. From the gut wrenching tragedy so overwhelming it was a very real horror in its own right, the movie took a salto mortale into the lamest religious trash horror ever. If you remember that moment in "From Dusk Till Dawn" when everybody in the bar suddenly turned into vampires? And for a moment you are not quite sure whether you fell asleep and have a bad dream or someone unnoticed slipped some 'spice' into your drink or something... Only Aster isn't Tarantino either... Nor this transition is a deliberate clean cut intended to shock.
So, you are left in disbelief, thinking to yourself and hoping for like half an hour "oh, no, he is not going there, really he couldn't, could he...?" and he could. The whole package together with candles, glass moving on its own, holding hands around the table, decapitated rotten corpses, man burning alive, both ghosts and demons, hell kings.
Oh yes, and naked ghosts and naked cult followers, like being naked is somehow an unmistakable sign of hell and/or crazy... And yes, we all have our personal demons and ghosts from the past but really? Oh, we have skeletons in our closets as well; luckily Aster must have forgotten about those, otherwise some bones would have been rolling all over the screen for sure.
And most of all, the blue light chasing children and entering them literally. It is, you know, the mental illness virus passing from victim to victim... No wonder every other review mentions people at the theatre laughing. No matter whether you choose to file this movie as predominantly a family drama-tragedy or as a horror or just haven't paid enough attention to the hereditary mental illness issue or didn't get it at all or simply love ghosts - it is so so lame and forced and trashy and fake that every each way it doesn't work!
Girl decapitated, grandma decapitated, Annie decapitated. In case you don't follow this sophisticated allegory here it goes - whoever went full blown crazy was relieved of their head. Seriously??? The best you could do is to compare losing your mind to literally losing, no not losing, chopping off head?!?!?! Ok, the newest edition lunatic kept his and instead was even crowned, but no doubt is going to be guillotined in the sequel, when his crazy reaches full potential. It's wrong on so many levels that I am in loss for words to properly name it.