“Chris Hemsworth takes his girlfriend to a music festival featuring Florence and the Machine as well as a brief set by Orville Peck. They should have broken up before going, but they already had tickets, so they go anyway.
A couple elderly people die while stage diving, and you’d think this would put a damper on things, but it doesn’t.
Sloth from the Goonies makes an appearance and finger paints autographs, which everyone pretends to really respect without any irony.
Everyone does way too many drugs to actually have a good time, some fool brought a goddamn baby that cries through the night, the girlfriend wins the dance marathon from Gilmore Girls and Chris cheats on her, so she humiliates him by showing everyone a picture of him in a Halloween costume from third grade.
~
Alright, let’s be real:
-this movie is bloated. Why did we need to have the kids take shrooms at the beginning? To establish what hallucinogens are, for the ari aster fans who are unaware of hallucinogens?! If you are unaware, on even an intellectual level, of shrooms, you are not ever coming across this movie.
-halving the slow-mo shots of people doing wholly unremarkable things would’ve cut the run time significantly. I don’t need to see every moment where someone is walking from a shack to another shack. This movie had strong Blood Shack energy, but it didn’t need to pad the run time, so why!?
-you can’t show me an old man having his face smashed in with a mallet and then ask me to return to giving a flying fuck about whether these bros are doing the same topic for their theses. The stakes are way too high for that.
-this movie has, to an extreme degree, the horror problem where I know I’m watching a horror movie, but nobody in the movie knows they’re in a horror movie. I know SOMETHING is going to happen, so even small things, like the perhaps-temporary disappearance of a character, has alarm bells ringing. A movie can definitely have a period where the audience knows a lot more than the characters, but this period was SO LONG in this movie. Which is part of why I think people like it: it makes them feel smart. Because they’re smarter than the characters, but only because they know they are watching a horror movie. This is a trick, people, a gimmick to make you feel like you’re a genius. Doesn’t work on me! I know I’m a dumdum, so when I’m smarter than the characters, it’s because the movie is telegraphing that shit so hard.
-Ari Aster loves to film women wailing. That’s all I remember of Hereditary and why I turned it off. Overly long shots of this stuff. How many different ways can Florence Pugh frown in long closeups?
-Nudity: Frank Henenlotter did it better and gets no credit.
-I think this movie had one good idea: a horror movie that’s 100% daylight. And it wasn’t really used to any effect.
-dreams and hallucinations: I know I’m not speaking for everyone, but for me, get that shit out of here. Make your thing weird and make it actually weird. Don’t put the weirdness on the shoulders of dream/hallucination sequences. And it breaks the movie for me, because am I seeing what the character sees? Presumably yes, but why, and which character? A dream can mean anything. Most of our dreams are meaningless, yet in movies they’re freighted with meaning. Why? Because it’s an easy tool to create a false sense of narrative when you don’t know how else to remind the audience of something, like a character’s family being dead, or to give a character information they shouldn’t have, like a sense of dread.
-I just really don’t care for these movies that people seem to like, people who use words like catharsis and so on. This movie feels, to me, like a nothing sandwich, which some critics love because they can basically say anything about it. They can spread all sorts of theories and ideas onto the canvas because it’s nearly blank. It feels like a movie people only enjoy if they’re writing a review in their heads as they watch.
-I put this second to last on purpose: the whole cultural studies angle in the movie is so silly. We put our elderly in homes, I bet these people would be horrified by that. You’re right, let’s mash their heads into goo instead. The idea of a local desperate to bang an outsider, human sacrifices, a prophet who is the purposeful product of incest whose mind isn’t clouded. When you make this movie in India and call it Temple of Doom, you’re a racist. When you make it in Sweden, you’re a genius.
-the last one is for all you #girlboss folks calling this a #girlboss movie. I think it’d be pretty unfair to call Christian a terrible guy. I present: The Case for Christian: Christian is a youngish guy who has been dating a woman for some time, and he’s probably in over his head in terms of what she’s going through and needs and what he’s capable of, but that’s part of being in over your head: you don’t usually know it at the time. However, he does not stray, and he brings his girlfriend with him to Sweden, despite the fact that his traveling companions clearly do not want her to come. He plans to wait to take shrooms until she’s ready. He seems, at worst, kind of clueless. So when we reach the near-end and he’s raped (I think in most peoples’ minds, being drugged and then having sex counts, especially if that sex involves someone literally pushing you into someone else and a scene of intense regret and confusion immediately afterward), I have a hard time with the idea of him deserving his fate in any way, and it’s essentially his punishment for being raped. And, we’re meant to buy our main character feeling this wonderful sense of community and belonging by the end of this movie, but she was betrayed by this community almost immediately? This is not a moment of a woman taking control of her life, this is a woman completely surrendering control for the illusion of control. She gets to pick the sacrifice, but from only two people, who are selected in the most randomized possible way. She’s moved from her biological family, who were killed by suicide, to a “chosen” family, who will also end their lives. She’s selecting a group of weirdos who follow the words of a person born of “intentional inbreeding,” who have ONLY betrayed her up to now, but hey, they gave her a pretty crown, so let’s go with them, why wouldn’t you go with them over your boyfriend, who hasn’t been an A++, but he’s never drugged and raped anyone. “