Midsommar

n an interview with ’s Michael Koresky after the release of (2018), Ari Aster spoke of the logic behind his taboo-busting 2011 thesis film . Gesturing to his desire to rock the apple cart at the American Film Institute, a feeder school for serious filmmakers, he claims he started from the place of asking himself “What’s the worst thing I can make at the AFI?” and landed on a family drama about a father being sexually assaulted by his malevolent son. It’s a solid bad-boy origin story for a scrappy young talent, whose formalist chops across and his sophomore effort seem deliberately at odds with his’s protracted runtime, Big-Issue signposting, and overthe-top (if genuinely impressive) choreography further suggest that Aster isn’t a refiner of dicey genre texts that explore the dark corners of the human psyche, but a talented aesthete-troll who’s as capable as he is tasteless.