The movie Ari Aster names as one of the “best films” he’s ever seen
From his early childhood, Ari Aster was deeply inspired by the horror genre and developed a particular fascination with the tension-driven style of Stanley Kubrick’s classic Stephen King adaptation, The Shining. Aster also developed a passion reserved only for the geekiest of film geeks, for his fellow New York filmmaker Martin Scorsese.
Over the past half-decade, Aster has gained widespread critical recognition for his first two unique and distinctly disturbing movies, Hereditary and Midsommar. Adding to his cinematic repertoire, Aster’s latest creation, Beau Is Afraid, starring Joaquin Phoenix, has garnered mixed reviews but won the favour of some moviegoers upon its release in May 2023.
Hereditary, Aster’s first movie, arrived in 2018 and stunned moviegoers worldwide with its rather grotesque and jumpy plot fraught with bizarre behaviour and supernatural presence. Arriving just a year later, Midsommar was less supernatural in nature but repaid the horror deficit in gore and outrage.
Although his first two movies are overtly shocking, Aster has a shrewd eye for subtlety in cinema. When picking out five of his all-time favourite movies in 2018 shortly after releasing Hereditary, he first commended Andrew Haigh’s 2015 movie 45 Years as a “brilliant ghost story”.
“Having now seen it about ten times, I’m convinced that Andrew Haigh’s brilliant ghost story is one of the best films I’ve ever seen,” he wrote in The Cinéma Club. “It also has one of the most perfect final shots in all of cinema. Pair this one with the also-perfect The Age of Innocence [Martin Scorsese film from1993] (which serves as the opposite side of the same thematic coin) for a pummeling double feature.”
Although not strictly a horror, Haigh’s 45 Years is a subtly haunting tale of a couple who are planning their 45th wedding anniversary when a letter arrives for the husband one week before the celebratory party. The letter informs him that his first love, whom he kept a secret, has been discovered, frozen in the icy glaciers of the Swiss Alps.
As the story unfolds, the wife, portrayed by Charlotte Rampling, questions their relationship of more than four decades. How much of it had been a lie? Or her husband’s vain attempts at replacing the affections of his lost partner? An unseen spectre, this former partner begins to haunt the elderly couple as they attempt to rebuild their relationship towards their anniversary celebration.
Watch the trailer for 45 Years below.
