Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
Following the sudden death of his mother, a mild-mannered but anxiety-ridden man confronts his darkest fears as he embarks on an epic odyssey back home.
Ari Aster's most divisive and ambitious work is a genuinely singular piece of cinema — a three-hour surrealist nightmare rooted in Oedipal dread and Kafkaesque anxiety that exists unlike almost anything else in mainstream filmmaking. Joaquin Phoenix delivers a towering, physically committed performance anchored in pure existential terror, and the film's visual scope — from claustrophobic urban hellscapes to dreamlike forest sequences — is strikingly composed and immersive. Novelty is extremely high; this is an unmistakably one-of-a-kind vision. However, the plot, while thematically coherent, is deliberately punishing and episodic in ways that frustrate conventional engagement, and the ending — though thematically on-brand — collapses under the weight of its own mythology, feeling both overlong and anticlimactic rather than cathartic or revelatory.