Ari Aster needs some serious therapy

Rating: 7/10 (28 March 2020)

Like his previous movie "Hereditary" i'm just not as excited about this film as apparently everyone else. I love horror movies, but this isn't actually a horror movie, just like "Hereditary". Instead the director again only uses the ways of the genre to give us an extremely disturbing look into his mind.
I'm really a big fan of directors like David Lynch and David Cronenberg, i Like it when a horror movie disturbes me or challenge me or dares to be surreal and open to interpretation. In that way the movie is very interesting and effective, the missing daylight is also a very interesting and unique effect. But just like the continuously pounding music in "Hereditary" it doesn't really help the movie, it actually makes the shocking scenes less scary and effective.
In the end Aster took his personal problems, reused a lot of the same imagery as in his last film (dark rituals, unusually long shots of mutilated body's in unsettling graphic detail, a strange child, up and emotionally unrelatable characters in hopelessly lost relationships), all culminating in a variation of the same ending, combined with the end of "The Wicker Man". His ideas, concepts and characters are not as deep or interesting as he thinks.
However the movie is very well directed and Florence Plough gives a fantastic performance as always. Jack Raynor is also very good in a rather thankless role.
It's an interesting movie, but it goes on far too long, since you can not really invest in the characters or feel for them and the solution is not very clever, you can see it coming long before the ending. I'm sorry, but for me Ari Aster is not a master of the genre, he is just someone with a worrying interest in images of gruesome mutilated corpses.