The movie Ari Aster considers one of modern cinema’s “great gifts”
Back in 2018, the name Ari Aster was everywhere. Not only was it everywhere, but it was also being uttered in hushed reverence. The art-house horror director had just released Hereditary, his A24 debut. The film made him a household name, paving the way for his next feature, 2019’s Midsommer, a cathartic horror set in Sweden, which was deeply indebted to the folk horror of the 1960s and ’70s, and which seemed to have catalysed the genre’s rebirth. Here, the director showers praise on one of Sweden’s most revered directors, Roy Andersson.
Aster’s feature film directorial debut came nearly a decade after his film school thesis project, The Strange Thing About The Johnsons, premiered at the Slamdance Film Festival. It later leaked online and went viral, capturing the attention of A24, with whom he released Hereditary, a harrowing tale about one American family’s dark ancestry.
These days, Aster is considered a leading authority when it comes to art-house cinema. Speaking to Sight and Sound magazine recently, the director recommended Roy Andersson’s Songs from the Second Floor to viewers hungry for truly unique cinema. “If one is to argue the supremacy of the image in cinema, Andersson represents the sort of dazzling apogee,” he wrote. “Everything is built from scratch on a sound stage, no detail left to accident. His humour is sublime, his vignettes among the great gifts in modern movies”.
Released in 2000, Songs from The Second Floor is the first film in Andersson’s The Living Trilogy. It plays with the very fabric of filmic reality, weaving a constellation of parallel narratives, each concerning something strange, unruly and illogical, into a web of glorious, transcendent absurdity. Andersson’s main focus is Karl, who stands alone as the new millennium gives way to a mass mental breakdown. Many films have captured the strangeness of being alive, but few have done so with such haunting beauty.
Through a series of 46 vignettes, Andersson’s lens moves through a city held in perpetual gridlock, entering the inner worlds of its disenchanted, unfulfilled and jaded inhabitants. Stark, grotesque and uniquely funny, Songs from The Second Floor explores the emptiness at the heart of late-capitalist societies while interrogating the universal aspects of the human condition. What Radiohead’s OK Computer was to music, Songs from The Second Floor was to film. You can check out the original trailer below. But be warned, it’s not a film for the faint-hearted.
