Betrayal as Design: Artifice, Catharsis, and the Films of Ari Aster”

The two paragraphs below are excerpts from Michael Koresky’s interview with Ari  Aster through The Lincoln Center on May 1, 2018) https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-ari-aster/

 “And that is something I wanted to do here. To make a film that betrays you on every level, where you become invested in all these people, and what happens to them is not fair. You have to contend with it. My biggest problem with recent horror films is that I feel like there’s this agenda—I don’t know if it’s a studio agenda—to let you off the hook. And if everyone gets fucked at the end, they make sure you’re not invested in anybody. And the films that always got to me were operating on more of an existential level, where it’s like, okay, we’re going to pose the problems of life, things tapping into your most primal fears—death, does anybody know anybody?—and not resolving anything, just rubbing your face in the inevitability of all that stuff. That stuff’s not pleasant and we think we go to horror movies to avoid them. We want to go on an experience, we want to be riveted, taken on a ride, and we want to be scared. And I think with Hereditary, and other films I’m referencing, they turn on you, they ask, so do you want to be scared? And the only way I know how to do that is to go into my fears and what bothers me.

What are your fears?

I’m afraid of dying alone. I’m afraid of being responsible for something horrible happening to someone I love and then not being forgiven. I’m afraid of somebody in my family turning on me. That’s something I’m not even aware of consciously, but my nightmares as a kid were always about someone who matters most to me changing. Even if you go back to Freud’s essay on the uncanny—and I’m probably misrepresenting what he said—he says that horror is when the home becomes unhomelike, unheimlich. And that is something I was thinking about a lot in this film. I wanted to make a home that became something malign and unrecognizable by the end. And that’s where the miniatures come in as well. It’s a replica of the real thing. It is the thing, but it’s not the thing. That is your mother, but it’s not your mother.” 

Life’s a dick. 

Everything and everyone can be intimidating, so we nervously laugh and continue on our way. 

This warped twist on the old adage “life’s a bitch” has never felt more fitting than when describing Ari Aster’s filmography. We crave comfort—a reassuring hand on the shoulder reminding us things will be okay. Aster has built a career out of denying us that comfort, swapping it for bleak catharsis.

I use the word catharsis intentionally—it’s one Aster seems to favor . For him, catharsis isn’t resolution or relief. It’s the raw, chaotic embrace of the grotesque. He’s said that he dislikes “letting audiences off the hook,” and that philosophy drags me back to my earliest memories of horror—when I couldn’t even bear to watch scary movies, shielded by my parents and by my own fragile nerves. It took years before I could stomach horror’s visceral shocks. But even then, I clung to the idea  that narrative justice needed to be served to feel satisfied. Heroes had to survive. Villains had to fall. When they didn’t, I felt betrayed.

That’s Aster’s gift: betrayal. More than most filmmakers, he weaponizes that feeling. In Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau is Afraid, the emotional gut-punch isn’t just sadness or fear—it’s the breaking of an unspoken deal between storyteller and audience. The deal that says: this will make sense, this will resolve, and you will get closure. With Aster, you don’t. And somehow that betrayal feels honest and even comforting in its bleakness.

Aster’s obsession with artifice ties directly into this betrayal. He’s spoken admiringly of Peter Greenaway and his film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover—a film that Aster claims, “ruined” him. Watching it for the first time at 25, I immediately understood. Greenaway’s dollhouse aesthetic traps you in the frame. There’s no cutaway, no relief. Just the slow, suffocating madness of watching wide-eyed at some of the most sickening depths of human depravity. Aster does the same. His films are tableaus (Hereditary most obviously), stage-like prisons where the audience gawks like zoo visitors. But he goes further—he traps us inside these dioramas, tied to the characters’ unraveling minds, until we are no longer distant observers but helpless participants.

Aster’s real trick isn’t just the rug-pull plot twist. It’s the way he gaslights the audience. He litters clues everywhere—but they’re so buried in strangeness, they seem like noise. We think: “Am I overthinking this?” But we’re not. In Aster’s world, paranoia is not only justified—it’s the only sane response. The dread is real. The trap is real. We ignored the signs because we wanted comfort, and we were left with the truth.

Despite their intrinsic darkness,  Aster’s films aren’t pure misery, I actually feel the opposite while watching them. They’re laced with absurd, bitter humor—the kind that bubbles up when things get so unbearable, we can’t help but laugh. He refuses sentimentality, resolution, and safety. Beau is Afraid perfects this. Its ending—Beau drowning as an amphitheater full of conspirators silently leave—felt like a slap the first time I saw it. But on rewatch, I respected it. I even laughed. The ending didn’t matter; the chaos of the journey did. Once you let go of the need for logic or closure, the comedy shines through.

That isn’t to say Aster can’t tell a proper story. Hereditary and Midsommar prove he can. But now he’s deconstructing that ability, stripping narrative down to its nervous system. And why wouldn’t he? He’s confessed his greatest fear is dying alone. Beau’s ending—the quiet, unceremonious death watched by no one who cares—feels like the most honest expression of that fear. Life reduces us to spectators. Death makes us truly alone. And the world keeps going.

But there’s something else—something oddly hopeful. At the Cannes press conference for Eddington, Aster said a takeaway of his new film’s takeaway is simple: “re-engage with one another. That surprised me. For all the doom and paranoia of his films, there’s this call for connection buried beneath. It may be a twisted, corrupted, cultish connection—but connection nonetheless. Hereditary’s cult, Midsommar’s Härga, the cult of Mona Wassermann, they’re communities built on false truths that serve only the powerful.  They serve as warnings: this is what happens when collective unity dies and is replaced by control.

Technology and paranoia fuel the dynamic between power and isolation. In Beau, screens and surveillance crush the sense of self. In Eddington, from what little we know, these forces are tightened. Aster isn’t preaching—he’s showing the  suffocation of individual thought by programmed realities, by the death of shared truth. His villains—Paimon’s cult, the Härga, MW Corp—rewrite history and truth to expand their control. They are able to succeed in this because no one agrees on what’s real anymore.

This is the trap: if you try to escape, you die. Peter jumps out the window. Connie and Simon protest the Härga, Beau pushes against his mother, all doomed. Their death is their escape. Annie tries burning her children alive in hopes that death can provide true solace. The family can’t even die from their own will, it is predestined. But what about the members of the ruling group? Even the Härga are controlled in their death. While not confirmed, Aster did point out even Paimon’s cult may have suffered after the events of the film. Who is to say once they successfully invoked Paimon, they didn’t relinquish all control over their free will and ended up suffering  immediately.  In these worlds, every fabric of a lifecycle has been sown before one is even born. So what’s left? Do we surrender? Or do we just laugh? Probably both.

In the Aster universe, there are only two certainties: everything will fall apart, and the collapse will force you to crack a smile, in the darkest way possible. There is no comfort. But in the absurd, nervous laughter we share as the amphitheater empties, Aster delivers unto us a type of freedom-a collective release only possible through catharsis. 

FInal Note: As I was in the process of writing this, I noticed that outside my apartment on the patio floor, lay a dead bird. Already infested with flies, I couldn't help but stare, probably longer than I should have. It was morbid and it made me sad, but I accepted it and eventually walked away. This occurrence reminded me of something-the way Aster’s films draw us in to the point we have to stare at the atrocity, even if our brain tells us to look away. It’s an acceptance of the negative while simultaneously an embrace to move on. At the same time as I was writing about death, he was waiting right outside my door. 

I wrote the following piece minutes after discovering the deceased creature. 

There’s A Dead Bird Outside My Door 

There’s a dead bird outside my door-on my porch

I had cracked the blinds quarter to seven-i did not peek outside

It’s 9:09 now and It surprised me-a hatchling in baby-form

But it did not shock me-I challenged myself

To radically accept 

That the flies and their eggs burrowed deep

Will writhe inside this vessel and emerge as maggots on top

Just squirming white specs from where i stand 

Two days ago, I killed an old fly with a dollar store washcloth 

So maybe the  flies on my porch are inviting me to watch their feast

Feet apart-the bird, the flies, and I 

Separated by off tracked plastic and clouded glass

One eye open-that’s how I’ll remember the bird

I’m paralyzed  and can’t transport the body

I’m afraid I’d crush its insignificant weight in my palm

I spotted a snapping turtle as I rolled down the road leading my apartment

I stopped and looked if I could maneuver it

The idea of the next car speeding by without noticing-the black speck disappearing behind the rising of the muggy heat-the june concrete

It upsets the ulcer inside my pit

Its an irritant that erupts when I acknowledge that the slack-

It will linger

But distancing with bandaids in hopes of eluding injury is a sliding glass door

Too weak to handle you

One day, the morning fog and murky glass will unify and it’ll all look the same to you

And when you hear the treble of buzzing coming from outside

It will not be outside anymore-it will stretch your isolation-it’ll be tangible

The glass is pathetic your human form as you sift through it

When it shatters, your body wrests backwards

And underfoot–a crunch

It rings and echoes deep inside your own noise

The bones-it’s only been two days?