“I just don’t want to put any more stress on my family.”

Disappointing. Wanted so much more from this. Maybe it would be remiss to call it overhyped (what’s scary is subjective, after all), but this did very little for me in terms of fright factor. Perhaps scarier if you’ve haven’t seen many horror films from the 70s and 80s. Ari Aster plumbs deep into the well of Roman Polanski but forgets to find ways to develop his story and characters along the way that would help differentiate his work. Aster isn’t a great writer but he does show promise as a director — the production design, camera work, and score are very strong, but they’re just never enough to fully compensate for the diffuse nature of the storytelling and theme work.

A big shame. I was really looking forward to this. I’ll be elaborating more tomorrow with another piece for FilmFisher.