Ari Aster has very well demonstrated his capabilities as an up-and-coming filmmaker, and I hope to see many more features from him. 'Munchausen' precedes his full-length movies by a few years, but even here we see his burgeoning prowess as both writer and director.
It's a simple story at hand; the most basic premise effectively describes the whole: A loving mother, sad at her son's pending departure for college, makes him ill to keep him at home, but with dire consequences. The tongue-in-cheek fun is in how this small tale is told, and it's quite smart.
There is no sound or dialogue underneath Daniel Walter's complementary original music, only visuals. First we get a bittersweet montage as the mother watches her son packing boxes, then going on to find great success at university: hard work, great academic skills, extracurricular achievements, falling in love. The mother's joy at this conventional but fulfilling future for her son is stymied by her loneliness - and then she snaps out of her day-dreaming, and sees her son continuing to pack.
The film cuts from one scene to another in this montage mostly by zooming in on a particular item, then zooming back out to show a shift in setting and time. The story is lent a slightly fantastical, nostalgic air not just through the sequence of scenes with only music for audio, but also with the soft colors brought out in the picture.
That happier sensibility is rocked when the mother makes her son ill, with terrible results. The soft, bright colors during the daydream turn more hard and shaded as the story advances toward its conclusion, and not even the appearance of ubiquitous character actor Richard Riehle, as an attending physician, can lighten the mood.
There's a hint of sardonic playfulness in the short in the contrast between the sentimental, wistful tone and the actual events of the narrative as it unfolds. It's an intentional disparity in presentation and style that makes this all the more grabbing, even for its simplicity and brief runtime. I'm certainly reminded of Aster's outstanding film 'Midsommar,' where he employs a similarly striking divergence to paint over the horror of the story with an inescapably warm, jubilant atmosphere. It's a difficult balance to manage, but Aster has proven himself. Enjoyable as 'Munchausen' is generally, at least in my mind this is the most noteworthy aspect.
It's always interesting to watch the early works of filmmakers as they developed their craft, and sometimes it's very revealing. With 'Munchausen' we see that Ari Aster already had a clear knack for storytelling that he refined further before stepping forward with full-length features. These are sixteen minutes that are fun, if dark, and worth checking out.
