Isn’t the role of the artist to put your sickness in other people?—Ari Aster 

Contains spoilers for Hereditary and Midsommar.

Hereditary and the Horrible, Hopeless God Machine

“Life is suffering,” says 38-year-old American filmmaker Ari Aster, who is given to cliché, and likes to make light of the darkness. After rising to prominence in the 2010s with his first two feature horror films, Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019), and solidifying his style with the three-hour nightmare comedy Beau Is Afraid in 2023, Aster has established himself as a modern horror auteur under the production label A24. His films are probably best known for their apocalyptic yet absurd endings.

Aster often plays on the idea that our worst fears and phobias are actually completely rational and lucid. Consider a scene from one of the short films he made during his time at the American Film Institute, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), an incest romp about a son who molests his own father in a dreamy American suburbia. In one scene, to cope with his horrifying reality, the father is sitting in the tub listening to a self-help tape—voiced by Aster himself—which is saying something about how our attitudes create our reality, when the son kicks in the bathroom door and rapes him. This is Aster straddling the line between horror and hilarity. 

Aster uses screenwriting to work through dark feelings of his own. “I’m a very neurotic guy. I’m hypochondriacal. I’m somebody who, I’m in a crisis until I resolve it, and then I replace it with a new one,” he recently told Vulture. “And I usually write in crisis. So for me, writing these films has been therapeutic because all of a sudden I can take out my anxieties and my worst-case scenario imagination on these characters and watch them navigate it, as opposed to navigating it to no end in my own life.” 

Aster has described Hereditary as a family tragedy “that curdled into a nightmare.” The story centres on a miniaturist named Annie Graham (Toni Collette), her psychologist husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), and their two children, sixteen-year-old Peter (Alex Woolf) and his twelve-year-old sister, Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Annie’s mother has just died and she delivers a funeral speech that conveys just how strained their relationship was, something that’s reflected in Annie’s chilly relationship with her own children. 

One night, her son Peter asks to borrow the car to take to a “school barbeque thing.” Annie makes him take Charlie with him. There, Charlie has an allergic reaction to some nut-infused cake while Peter is off trying to get laid, and while en route to the hospital, she sticks her head out of the window to gasp for air and gets decapitated by a telephone pole when Peter swerves out of the way of a deer carcass. At a support group some time afterwards, Annie is approached by a strange woman named Joan (Anne Dowd), who tries to help her contact her dead daughter through a seance. But soon the metaphorical ghosts and demons turn literal. 

It’s ultimately revealed that Annie’s mother was the leader of a demon-worshipping coven and Joan was her underling, and everything that’s been happening to the family has been part of an ancestral possession ritual to resurrect the demon King Paimon. He was born through Charlie but now Peter has been targeted as his new vessel. The tragedies pile up: The husband gets burned alive, Annie cuts off her own head with a piano string while floating in the air, and a bunch of naked people stalk the Graham home. The film ends with a resurrected Charlie, who is actually King Paimon, in Peter’s body, gazing mindlessly into space in a treehouse full of robed cult members as they erupt into a cry of “Hail Paimon!”

In the opening moments of the film, we zoom in on one of Annie’s miniature dollhouses that then grows to the size of their actual home, establishing a metaphor: These people have no more agency than dolls in a dollhouse. Aster has talked about how he wanted Hereditary to feel evil, as if the film itself were smiling at you while these innocent people are suffering. Like Peter Greenaway in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), he has explained, his aim as a director is to convey a god-like omniscience that feels nothing for its characters.