AUTOPSY: 2019

Here it is, my final best-of list for the decade. The top ten for the year, and eight excellent runners-up.

THE BEST:
10. The Golden Glove
9. Lords of Chaos
8. Doctor Sleep
7. Ad Astra
6. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
5. Midsommar
4. The Lighthouse
3. Color out of Space
2. In Fabric
1. The Nightingale

THE REST:
Arctic
Come to Daddy
High Life
The Irishman
Parasite
The Perfection
Terminator: Dark Fate
Velvet Buzzsaw

BEST TV:
Chernobyl

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT:
Godzilla: King of the Monsters

MOST HIGHLY ANTICIPATED FOR 2020:
Dune

EXHUMATION + Midsommar

Well, a year's flown by with no posts. I considered letting the EYE die, but my circumstances have changed, and I've found myself in a position where next year I'll have more time for this kind of thing. So why not resurrect the old corpse?

I'll kick things off with a few capsules of recent films. First, MIDSOMMAR.

Ari Aster certainly seems to be the real deal, but is he an auteur in the making, or just a very talented one trick pony? I say that because this film is so thematically similar to HEREDITARY. So far Aster’s main interest seems to be familial trauma/grief, and he has an obsession with depicting - in procedural detail - arcane ceremonies and rituals. I absolutely loved both films, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt, but it’ll be interesting to see what he comes up with next.

I rewatched the theatrical cut last night on blu-ray (I'll give the director's cut a shot on my eventual third viewing), and I definitely enjoyed it more the second time around. It's so visually rich, so packed with the details of life in the commune (and little easter eggs like that foreboding bear painting in the beginning), that it begs for repeat viewings, just to pick through the sumptuous production and costume design. And I love the queasy hallucinogenic VFX, sometimes subtle, other times vividly recreating a psychedelic peak, which in the situation depicted here is a terrifying prospect.

Aster is skilled at sustaining a sense of mounting dread that lingers in the back of your mind, becoming gradually more overt and threatening as the story progresses. He also utilises shock and gore to great effect, less is more, and when it hits, it hits hard. As with his previous shocker, one thing that really made an impression on me is his perverse use of corpses. Dismembered and defiled corpses are central to the ceremonies that close both films, creating imagery that's truly gruesome and haunting.

So, what's left to say? Florence Pugh (who made a big splash in LADY MACBETH) gives it her all in winning performance; faces are destroyed beyond recognition; and Ari Aster makes peace with the painful breakup that was the catalyst for his screenplay. Just stay away from drinks with pubes and period blood in them, or you'll get burned!

HEREDITARY

There's this discussion happening at the moment about an apparent discrepancy between audience reactions to HEREDITARY (which are surprisingly negative) and the almost unanimous praise it's received from critics. And having now seen it, I can understand why that might be the case. Ari Aster's first feature is an amazingly assured debut, and in all aspects of its production an objectively well made film, but casual viewers looking for a fun horror flick to escape from reality for a couple of hours are likely to be disappointed. HEREDITARY isn't so much a fun horror film as it is a relentlessly grim exercise in depicting demonic terror.

Comparisons to THE EXORCIST are certainly apt. Aside from the obvious touchstones of familial disintegration and demonic possession, it shares with Friedkin's film a sincere commitment to portray satanic evil as graphically and "realistically" as possible. The glee with which Aster wants to assault us with these sights and sounds is evident in the sheer level of detail that he's layered into HEREDITARY's many depictions of ritualistic occultism (not unlike the obsessive detail that Toni Collette's Annie puts into her miniature artworks). Indeed, the film places so much emphasis on this that it plays out as a sort of black magic procedural, and must be like crack for certain quarters of the black metal community (where it's surely bound for cult status). It should be noted that this focus on minutia is based on research: HEREDITARY's demon, Paimon, is a deity with a legion of devoted adherents to this day, and the sect's symbol in the film is Paimon's legit real world seal. Don't believe me? Google it.

At a certain point, around the middle of the film, HEREDITARY starts to feel so earnest, so dedicated in its intent to be as gnarly as possible, that I found myself being amused by the fanciful notion that the film itself might be a thing of evil. A demonic invocation in artistic form, requiring the participation of an audience to summon that which its director secretly worships.

No, I don't really think that Ari Aster is the leader of a satanic cult (even if his name suggests otherwise!), but that I could even jokingly entertain thoughts like that while watching HEREDITARY is a sure indication of its success. As with Liam Gavin's A DARK SONG, this is occult horror that eschews tongue-in-cheek self awareness in the pursuit of creating a mythology that feels truly grounded in realism, and is all the more scary for it. CLUCK!