rescott-99350

I've decided that the Ari Aster brand of "elevated" horror isn't really my cup of tea, but among the movies of his that I have seen so far, I do think MIDSOMMAR is the one I appreciated the most. If my lukewarm review rubs some people the wrong way, well so be it, Aster has many, many more supporters. He has a knack for painterly compositions and exploring complex but toxic psychological dynamics. Aster also doesn't always know how to pace his movies and isn't always sure when to delve into surreal dream logic or when its best to follow a more conventional plot. The most shocking things in an Aster movie are usually carefully deployed moments of body horror, but MIDSOMMAR and other Aster films rely much more on foreboding atmosphere than jump scares or shocks.

I've carefully avoided spoilers for MIDSOMMAR, because I do think if you can get on the director's wavelength, you'll appreciate his horror stories more than I probably do. To me, in this movie the best things are the performances (especially Florence Pugh, always riveting) and the rigorous and gorgeous production design. An endless Swedish summer day has never before seemed so menacing.

SUBSERVIENCE is like a Lifetime movie crossed with something you might find on SyFy (at the lower end) or Apple+ (if they had a big budget and were really trying). We get it...androids and AI are about to become much more omnipresent and with that comes inevitable dangers. There's hints of a serious examination of this around the edges of this story, but let's be honest, the movie exists to give us Megan Fox scantily clad and "acting" threateningly to our unsuspecting family. (Though they really shouldn't have been so trusting...nothing in this movie makes the idea of robot nannies seem remotely appealing.) The male lead makes dumb choices. The kids are weirdly trusting. Nothing unexpected or surprising follows. But Fox looks good and the rest of the movie has a generic, but reasonably convincing near future aesthetic, so if you're tired of all the holiday pabulum and want to indulge in some basic B-movie sci-fi exploitation, then maybe this movie is for you.

Perhaps because the writer-director is British he incorrectly believed that a movie called CIVIL WAR, about a near future civil conflict that has destroyed the United States, could largely ignore American politics and the specifics of the roots of the imaginary conflict and just focus on the fuzzy ethics of being a war correspondent? That's the only explanation I could come up with for why this movie was mostly ineffective to me...to paraphrase the old joke, Garland has put the em-PHAS-is on the wrong sy-LAB-ble.

I gave it 6/10 because the lead performances are strong, the special effects are convincing and there's one terrifying, very effective scene kicking off the last act that suggests the better, deeper movie that CIVIL WAR could have been. But once the last "shot" of the movie ended, I actually shrugged and that should NEVER be my reaction to a political movie that suggests such a compelling premise.