Ari Aster makes family distress frightening and finds jokes in people struggling to cope. We rate Hereditary highly; his later films have fine performances and passages of sharp comedy, but struggle to know when to stop.
Fi1m perspective
In the shop scene in Eddington (2025), a boy tells Joaquin Phoenix's sheriff that he could order online. We laughed hard, then felt uneasy, because Aster shoots the argument so that nobody gets to feel superior. He knows how quickly a small humiliation can make a person unreasonable. The problem with his later films is that he keeps adding scenes after he has made the point.
Hereditary (2018), his feature debut, remains our strongest recommendation because Toni Collette makes the family's distress matter as much as the scares. Aster spends enough time with these people for their suffering to trouble us, though some passages are slow. When he starts explaining what has been happening, he reduces the fear. Midsommar (2019) followed with daylight folk horror. His subsequent move towards comedy makes sense: the jokes were already there, alongside the dread.
The first hour of Beau Is Afraid (2023) is among Aster's funniest and most frightening. Phoenix is persuasive as the frightened middle-aged man trying to get from his flat to his mother's house. But the three-hour film cannot sustain that beginning, and its repeated insistence on the same point becomes exhausting. The editing lets the sections run too long, while the score works better as a nervous city hum than when its strings ask us to be moved.
Eddington is at its best when Aster stays with the household. Louise speaks softly and rarely, while Dawn's laptop-fed pronouncements are delivered with no hint of irony. Both benefit from Aster leaving room for us to work out what is wrong. The patient first hour gives way to a middle stretch crowded with people and incidents that never take shape. Start with Hereditary; with the later films, be prepared for the opening hour to be the strongest.
Biography
Ari Aster is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. He was born on 15 July 1986 in New York City.
Aster studied at the AFI Conservatory. He first gained recognition for the 2011 short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons. His feature films include Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), both of which he wrote and directed.
In 2019 he co-founded the production company Square Peg with Lars Knudsen. He wrote, directed and produced Beau Is Afraid (2023) and Eddington (2025), and served as producer on The Drama (2026).
