![]() And the director’s cut, offering up nearly 30 minutes of new and extended material, is a must for genre junkies. While shades of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) and Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man seem to be obvious influences, Aster’s eye for detail (Henrik Svensson’s intricate production design and Pawel Pogorzelski’s expert lensing are sensational), his deliberate pacing, and his operatic story structure, amounts to one hell of a hallucinatory headtrip. As Dani and her friends get swept up in the pagan traditions of their cult-like hosts, it’s not long before things get eerie and injurious. Fans of slow-burn mental anguish and arthouse aversion will find much to admire and dismay about in this lavishly detailed Swedish-set travelogue of terror.įlorence Pugh (Lady Macbeth) is mesmerizingly vivid and volatile as Dani, a young American woman navigating a devastating loss who, along with her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends, lose themselves on a “once-in-a-lifetime” getaway to a remote Swedish village where the midsummer festival there is a big deal. In a world that isn’t driven by line graphs and landlords, Vivarium might feel a little more like a silly nightmare, but there’s just no separating the themes of Vivarium from the path that humanity has been condemned to for longer than anyone can know.Writer-director Ari Aster’s previous film Hereditary, also on this list, there’s a palpable sense of overwhelming grief and the delicate threads of family reputably fraying at the center of Midsommar, a gorgeously depicted and frequently gruesome folk horror freakout. Vivarium slowly buckles and twists, like an old, bitter tree in the wind, until the very end, when it becomes increasingly clear what purpose this couple and their child were always going to serve. You gotta suspend your disbelief sometimes though!) before becoming trapped in a neighborhood of identical houses. ![]() ![]() The couple casually meets a real estate agent to look at a house (I know, I know. These two people care about each other and you can see it in their eyes. This is not a ‘relationships are bad’ movie so you can abandon that thought entirely. Tom is this cute handyman, full of life and happier than any of us have ever seen Jesse Eisenberg, and Gemma (played by the lovely Imogen Poots) is a bubbly and happy school teacher, and then things change. The story follows a couple and wow, they’re so happy at the beginning. Vivarium has a simple structure that can be disarming if you’re not careful, like the best Twilight Zone episodes. ![]() These are the best slow burn horror films to watch if you’ve got the breath and heartbeats to spare. Slow burn horror films often come with a message or a lesson, and they always take their time to get it right. It’s wonderful our fears can manifest themselves in such a variety of sub-genres but there’s nothing quite like dread.Ī sensation unlike any other that’s filled and festering with the open wounds of our biggest fears and insecurities, just waiting to bubble and pop over the edges, and swallow any human bold enough to believe they’re immune.Īll horror films are good but there’s just something so special about the films that take time to strain the strings on whatever that weird instrument is called that’s in every horror film (it’s called an Apprehension Engine, and it’s cool as hell), only letting them snap and whip off precisely when it’s time.Īnd that’s when people’s skin begins to metaphorically melt, exposing who they really are, or something sinister makes an appearance, changing everything. Horror films can really be anything, which is more of a reflection on us as people and less on movie studios.
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