This movie is a gift

Rating: 10/10 (8 August 2018)

The acting in this movie was excellent but what makes it so special is the reward that you get if you are in the moment and you pay attention to this movie. The dark atmosphere and uneasy feelings that you get from things like a child who mutilates dead animals or the uncanny valley of the life-like miniatures made it hard to look away and not be pulled in to this dreadful tale. Also the sound and music were spot on.
Ari Aster has shown himself to be a powerful and resourceful director using lots of different methods to tell this crooked and misdirecting horror story. I wish I could watch it again for the first time.
This may make me sound like a horrible person, but I feel really lucky that I was in the right mindset to watch this film. The bad reviews make me feel like I received something valuable that not everyone is going to get because I got to experience what the director wanted me to see the first time through. if you watch this movie and you are not invested. you are never going to get to watch it for the first time again because the ending will spoil that. And this movie is clearly a labor of love that doesn't come around very often. Especially for the actors. Toni Collete and Peter Wolf, particularly, gave us a piece of themselves on the screen.
When the ending comes, it will look silly to you if you weren't ready to see what was coming. SPOILER A lot of people had an issue with all the nudity. These were not models, the nudity was not fun to look at. The thing is, devil worshipers and satanists are often naked for rituals. There are lots of reasons but the one that I recall the most is that it is a rejection of the original sin, the rejection of the application of shame to nakedness. The rejection of a penalty applied to mankind by God. In that sense, it is supposed to make you uncomfortable. And the normal human reaction to feeling uncomfortable is to detach. So there were people in the audience laughing.
I felt the movie was slowly pulling you out of your comfort zone and that the pot was slowly and expertly brought to a boil. I feel lucky to be one of the people that really got their money's worth from this brilliant film.