Ari Aster's World
July 11–16, 2025
In the span of seven short years, Ari Aster has created a filmography unlike any other in contemporary cinema. One of the defining voices of A24’s achievement of worldwide cultural relevance, Aster has written and directed four daringly distinct works of cinema—Hereditary (2018), Midsommar (2019), Beau is Afraid (2023), and his latest, Eddington—unified in their refusal to play by the rules of genre, or the expectations for a filmmaker on the rise. While Hereditary and Midsommer both sync up with elements of horror, they’re also psychologically complex dramas haunted by grief—one locked in a fraught familial domestic space and the other in the lush Nordic expanse of a would-be romantic couples’ retreat. Then with Beau Is Afraid, Aster enlisted Joaquin Phoenix in a wild, visionary epic of the unconscious, worm-holing from one outrageous place to another while remaining in the uncanny headspace of one cowed man. And now, with Eddington, Aster cooks up a harrowing and hilarious fever-dream of America during the 2020 pandemic, opening up myriad new directions that Aster might take us in the years ahead.
— Eric Hynes, Director of Film Curation and Programming
