This week I watched exactly one movie, Beau is Afraid the new horror film by Ari Aster. Honestly, I’m not sure what I think of it. It isn’t a bad film, exactly, but it did take me three days to complete it. There was just only so much of it I could take in one setting. It is a film with a particular point of view, and that POV is rather unsettling.

Joaquin Phoenix plays a man with intense anxiety. He is the sort of person who always imagines the absolute worst thing possible is going to happen. The film essentially stays in his point of view and so I was never sure what was real and what was just in his head. Critic Matt Singer has a very good review of the film and he explains it much better than I am.

I finished Beau is Afraid yesterday and so it is not the Friday Night Horror Movie, but watching that film made me want to return to Ari Aster’s first full-length feature film, Hereditary. And that is the FNHM.

Like Beau is Afraid, Hereditary is a strange, unsettling film and I’m not entirely sure what it all means, but I connected to it much more strongly than I did with Beau.

Like so many modern horror films Hereditary is about grief. It begins with the death of a matriarch, or rather the funeral of the matriarch. She was a complicated, sometimes difficult woman as we’ll learn by listening to her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette) give her eulogy. Mother and daughter had a strained relationship. The family has a long history of mental illness that ends in tragedy.

Later another terrible tragedy will strike sending the family spiraling. Annie begins having visions of the dead. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) tries to hold the family together but his own grief envelops him. The son, Peter (Alex Wolff) blames himself for the accident.

The film goes to unexpected and weird places, almost none of it is believable, and yet I was completely carried away by it. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot as to avoid spoilers but if you like horror that find a unique way to terrify then this is a movie worth checking out.

Collette gives an absolutely riveting performance. Ann Dowd shows up too as a, well, again I won’t spoil it, but she’s always worth watching.