The “upsetting” 1989 movie Ari Aster wishes he’d never seen: “I regretted watching it for many years”
We’ve all had that feeling coming out of an Ari Aster film where we couldn’t say what happened, we could just tell you how we feel.
I would liken a lot of his movies to the classic horror novel House of Leaves. That whole book, with how experimental a lot of the writing is and how scattered the approach to creativity is, you don’t come away from that novel with a plot, but more just a vibe. You know how it made you feel, but you couldn’t recount a lot of the contents to many people.
Aster is able to achieve something similar in all his films. I think I speak on behalf of a lot of horror lovers when I say that easy scares inspired by sudden images and loud bursts of sound can be a lot of fun, but isn’t an example of great filmmaking. Aster puts everything that is happening in front of you, you tend to know more than a lot of the characters in his films the majority of the time, and yet, the sense of dread that he manages to create and that lingers throughout the entire picture is second to none.
The first film of Aster’s that a lot of people were subject to was Hereditary. Released in 2018, the story is one of a crumbling family, a grieving mother and demonic possession. After its release, it quickly became a talking point amongst the horror community as fans left the cinema excited about a potential new horror Godfather who was steadily making a name for themselves.
Of course, it wasn’t just the directing and writing of the film that turned heads. Toni Collette gave a phenomenal performance that was both terrifying and hypnotic, with the same being said for Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro and the rest of the cast. However, it was Aster who was able to bring out the best in the cast when making what was a career-making film.
The helplessness of the family is established in the film’s opening shot, which opens on a dollhouse in the middle of a room. In there, we get to see inside the toy house and characters that look similar to those in the film.
“There is also the feeling that we’re watching everything from a more knowing, sadistic perspective,” said Aster when discussing the opening shot of the film, “These are people who have no agency, and in the end, they are like dolls in a dollhouse.”
There were a number of films that played a part in inspiring this sense of dread, disgust and melancholy in the film, but one that Aster cited as being a huge inspiration was the 1989 flick The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. Aster said that he watched it when he was younger and regretted it for years because of how unnerving the whole thing was.
“I regretted watching it for many years,” he said. “There’s something so upsetting to me about the level of artifice in this film […] What you’re left with is Greenaway’s wholesale disgust with the human race.”
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is about… you guessed it… a cook, a thief, a wife and her lover. The Peter Greenaway picture is commonly interpreted as being an anti-capitalist masterpiece, as it breaks down how different structures of power are effective when it comes to ensuring the wealthy stay wealthy and the lower classes are kept firmly at the bottom of the ladder. It’s one hell of a satire, but it’s also deeply unsettling.
While the themes of Hereditary and The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover might be slightly different, you can see where Aster takes inspiration from. The disturbing tone which is intertwined throughout both films leaves you scratching your head, and they have that unspeakable quality, which means that when you come out of the cinema, and someone asks you, “How was the film?” The only reply you can muster is a hesitant “I… I don’t know”.
