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Overview
We start our visits to past directors with Hereditary by Ari Aster. You tell us – is it demon possession? Is it mental unstability? hmmmmm.
What do you think about this and how it compares to Midsommar from Season 03? And which order did you see them and how did that affect your viewing of the other one?
There is some great sound work in this movie. Best viewed – heard – with a good surround system while watching.
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Stephen: [00:00:00] We were just getting done with our little intros and now we’re on to episode one of season five, which is Hereditary by Ari Aster.
Rhys: Yes. Heredity was his first movie. And one of the things I came across when I was researching this, that I think is really cool. Ari Aster claims to have the screenplays set for 10 movies.
He’s like
Stephen: Quentin Tarantino.
Rhys: He’s going through the list. So Heredity was first. Midsommar was second. Bo was Afraid was the third one. Who knows where we’re going from here.
Stephen: Interesting. And I will say, Hereditary I had seen right before we did Midsommar and we watched Midsommar, and I did go to the theater and see A Bow Is Afraid.
Bow Is Afraid was my least favorite of the three, but they’re all similar in how they deal with the characters. The horror, quote unquote, psychological aspects of life.
Rhys: Yeah. So [00:01:00] I saw heredity first. And. It ended so bleakly that when I went to watch Midsommar, I was like, Oh my gosh. Danny’s there’s something horrible is going to happen to Danny.
I just kept waiting for it. And it didn’t. And it was like this big surprise. Now you watched Midsommar first. Did that affect what you were thinking when you watch Heredity?
Stephen: I don’t know if it affected a whole lot, but. I think it actually was more affected when I saw Bo is afraid because a lot of his, and I make notes of this, his horror is more psychological and it is very arguable in all three of those to different degrees, different reasons, whether, What is happening is really happening or if it’s just in your head because of drugs and midsummer or hereditary of, because of people are mentally ill being passed through the family, and Bo is afraid is definitely.
A point of view of somebody who is like [00:02:00] afraid of everything in the world and what their life is like. And so there’s a, all three of them share that characteristic of what am I watching? Is it really the movie or is it just some weird thing? The main character scene?
Rhys: Yeah. The film was released on January 21st, 2018.
So
Stephen: we’re doing yeah, we’re recording this. It’s another anniversary. Yeah,
Rhys: it released at Sundance and then on March 11th at the Southwest Film Festival and April 21st at the Overlook Film Festival. Which is a horror only festival, the Overlook Film Festival that they hold in New Orleans.
Stephen: We need to plan to go sometime.
Rhys: Yeah. I was thinking something along those lines. New Orleans is a
Stephen: great trip, man.
Rhys: Yeah. It released worldwide on June 8th of that year. So it first debuted at Sundance and then about five and a half months later, there was a world release into theaters. [00:03:00] The budget for this movie was estimated at about 10 million.
And the worldwide gross was 82 million. So it was quite successful.
Stephen: Nice. Yeah. And a little side note with all the issues, these big budget movies are having making their money Colin and I keep talking about it, that, we’re probably going to start seeing more of these low budget movies.
That you may not have seen before, not the big special effects, everything. And we talked about that with Omen, the director laughed. He’s yeah we spent 42 to make that shot where Troughton gets stabbed with the spear. It’d be like 2, 000 now with the special effects. So that’s a lot of budget just for that one scene when they can do it for a couple bucks.
Rhys: Yeah, so it was a 72 million profit versus the 41 million profit that he made for midsummer, which I think is [00:04:00] interesting because heredity came out as a surprise and people went to see it and then they really pushed midsummer, but it actually grossed less money. In the end then heredity did.
Stephen: That’s interesting. Cause I knew multiple people that said, Oh man, midsummer looks really good. I’m going to go see it. I remember hereditary, but I didn’t go see it type thing. So that’s interesting that actually wound up different.
Rhys: It’s also profit numbers. So maybe his budget was bigger for Midsommar than it was for Heredity.
Yeah. Heredity is a little bit shorter. It’s two hours and seven minutes. So it’s 21 minutes shorter than Midsommar.
Stephen: Yeah. Midsommar is a long movie to be looking through the drug eyed main character.
Rhys: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It was really funny because one of the promotional things they did for heredity when it came out, they like had a promo that would play, like you would get a trailer before a movie [00:05:00] starts and somewhere in Western Australia, that trailer got linked up with a kid’s movie.
And so all these parents are there with their kids to watch a little mermaid or something. And then ad for heredity came up and people left the theater. It was like a big deal. Yeah.
Stephen: There’s a couple of kids in it the one girl plays with birds and it’s fine.
Rhys: Yeah. It got 161 nominations and 50 wins. Wow. As opposed to, Mid summer that got 101 nominations and 27 wins.
Stephen: Wow. So that’s a lot for, we talk about that with most of the movies to win that many that’s pretty impressive.
Rhys: Now I came across this statistic and I have a little bit of an issue with it.
Cause I don’t, it doesn’t seem right to me. It was distributed by a 24 and they say it was the fourth title of theirs that enjoyed a wide release. The three that they’re [00:06:00] saying that enjoyed a wide release before Heredity was The Witch, Free Fire, and It Comes at Night. A24 also released Ex Machina, Lady Bird, and Room, all before Heredity, and you can’t tell me those didn’t come out to, Lady Bird was like critically acclaimed, there’s no way that wasn’t a wide release.
Stephen: I guess what’s their definition of wide release, just in the States as opposed to States and Canada and Italy and yeah,
Rhys: It was shot in 32 days. This whole movie was done in a 32 day shoot
Stephen: and it is a limited scenes, they’re at the school, they’re at the party.
Most of it does take place in one location. So I’m sure that. Helped get it done quick.
Rhys: Yeah. He also, Midsommar was pretty quick too. He likes to shoot quickly whenever, he’s got a project. I’d be curious to know how long it took to do Boa was Afraid. Yeah, that was
Stephen: a long movie. It was [00:07:00] mostly Joaquin Phoenix, right when that’s yeah, it was mostly him.
So he’s pretty spectacular. I’m sure he could nail his scenes pretty good because he’s got a lot of interaction in a lot of it.
Rhys: Heredity was shot in Utah as well, which is where the American scenes for midsummer were shot. But heredity, he picked Utah because he liked the way it looked like with the mountains and the trees.
The stark nature of the wilderness there. He said it was beautiful yet menacing.
Stephen: Yeah, I’ve got a few comments about the way things look later.
Rhys: Yeah. He wanted to write a film about family trauma and how it can eat away at a family unit. And he did such a good job. This is. One of the most depressing films to watch multiply and watch several times and to study it because he does such a good job at depicting what’s going on.
Stephen: Oh, Tony Collette is
Rhys: [00:08:00] amazing. This has
Stephen: some big name actors in it. As far as I’m concerned, very respected actors. He seems to be getting some good people in his stuff. And yeah, she does amazing. Even the two kids. The girl I haven’t seen before, Alex Wolf, I think I’ve seen him one or two other places, but they’re all just really great in the whole thing, and it adds to that.
And I do know the, because of the very depressing, strong psychological stuff going on. I know a few people that couldn’t finish the movie and didn’t. A few people I know didn’t even wanna see it.
Rhys: I watched it through a couple of times and I think it was the third or fourth time that I was like, okay, I got to do notes on this.
It’s just so painful to actually go through in two. So yeah it’s a very. A very heavy film to watch. Yeah, very much. He sees it as a Sophocles style play where you have this whole concept of free will versus fate [00:09:00] and the Graham’s fam, the grant the final solution for the Graham family is decided by fate.
It doesn’t really seem to be free will, because everything seems to happen for a reason in an order as you go through.
Stephen: Yeah, and this is one of those movies where it’s like you watch with some people or some people have seen it, you sit down, there could be multiple interpretations, multiple feelings about what was done and why and where and what it means.
And it could be a long discussion around the campfire on this one.
Rhys: It’s really funny because, while I was researching this, I found a Reddit post where he was in the Reddit post answering questions people had about the movie. And so like somebody asked this question and he got all excited because they, the question they were asking, they were like, is this?
And he’s yes, that’s exactly what I meant to do. And I’m reading through it. And I was like, Hey, it’s super cool that he’s engaging with fans on Reddit. Yeah. But then the bottom comment on the page was like, [00:10:00] The ending of this movie had nothing to do with the rest of the film. You should be ashamed of yourself.
And I’m like, what in the world are you
Stephen: talking about? Hopefully he understands that there are just trolls in the world that will rip anything down. And most of those people, if you go look at their posts, everything they post says that, and then they probably didn’t even watch the whole movie.
Rhys: So I’m actually betting it was somebody who went into it and saw the psychological thing.
And just thought it was people who are crazy. And then when it got supernatural at the end, that really turned them off.
Stephen: And I would argue that you could still interpret it either way at the end. Any psychological horror. You could argue that what they’re seeing is just what they’re seeing or, they did it, but they don’t remember doing it because they’re snapped from reality or something, arguably, it could hold [00:11:00] water.
Rhys: He said the film, he pitched it as a story about a long lived possession ritual told from the perspective of the sacrificial lamb which is interesting. Because it brings up the whole question about who exactly is the sacrifice. And there are a couple actually, as you go through the film
Stephen: and I was going to make the comment that this movie, as far as story goes, arguably does not follow the typical three parts of a story,
And a lot of good horror does not do that.
I’ve been arguing that with a lot of people about story and not. Everything has to follow the three parts structure and all that. There’s no hero’s journey here. It, you might even argue that it’s a typical horror template because most of the really crazy shit happens right near the end and that seems typical of horror.
And before that, it’s all just buildup. It’s, and it’s almost like horror is adjacent to mystery [00:12:00] because you get these little clues as to what’s going on. And you’re trying to figure out what exactly it is, which leads to the argument Who’s the lamb? What, who’s the focal point of the movie? You don’t even realize who is the focal point of the movie until most of the way through it.
Rhys: The target of a cult. You don’t really get that until you’re deep into the film. The films that influenced him in making this, it’s quite the list. The cook, the thief, his wife and her lover. Which Helen Mirren was in, in the 1990s. That is a absolutely bizarre ordinary people. I don’t know if you remember watching that in the early eighties, Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler Moore were in it in 1980, it was about suicide.
Rosemary’s baby, 1968 which makes all kinds of sense. Again, you have this cabal who’s planning out people’s lives and the innocence from 1961. Good movie. Yeah. Go back in season one.
Stephen: I just saw another Debra Kerr was in the Peter [00:13:00] Sellers Casino Royale comedy from the late sixties. Oh, wow.
Yeah, she’s weird in it. They’re all weird in it, but yeah. Oh, hey, I recognize her.
Rhys: He said he originally wanted to do this as a, just a movie that studied family drama. And over time it turned into this horror piece and what he ended up with was a movie about suffering, which I think is actually a very apt word to attach to this movie suffering because the whole gist of it is for people to suffer.
Yep. Yep. Colin Stetson composed the music for the film. I actually looked it up. Usually I’m always like, I should have looked this up. Astor really wanted him to do it and he reached out to him to do it two years before they even started filming. Wow. So that really lends itself to his whole, I’ve got 10 whole screenplays ready to go.
This guy had done work on color out of space the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and he did the music in the menu. [00:14:00]
Stephen: Interesting.
Rhys: Yeah. He’s a
Stephen: horror composer.
Rhys: Yeah, exactly. He like does this whole kind of ethereal background tension building kind of thing with his with his music. He did his own vocals for the pieces.
There was a lot in the way of vocals, but near
Stephen: the end a bit.
Rhys: Yeah. And Astor’s only real direction for him when he had them and him do it, he’s make the score feel evil.
Stephen: And I must say, this is another one, you’re not going to get memorable, catchy tunes that you buy a soundtrack for.
Almost like mood pieces and that’s all it really is for music. It might even be a stretch.
Rhys: If you’re buying the soundtrack to heredity, you need to get professional help.
Stephen: Betterhelp. com.
Rhys: Yes. Yeah.
Stephen: We’ll put an ad in here that we need to sponsor. They need to sponsor this episode.
Rhys: Tony Collette plays [00:15:00] Annie.
And we did her full bio way back when we did Krampus. So go back and listen to Krampus if you want to hear the complete rundown.
Stephen: And I thought she was fantastic in that movie, but so good in this one.
Rhys: Yeah. And she, she almost didn’t take it because she wanted to get away from doing dark themed films, but when she read the script, she was like, how can I not?
And so that’s what actually, Got her going. She said afterwards Ari Aster is the most prepared director she has ever worked for. Oh, wow. So yeah, she’s, she doesn’t even like horror movies. She did Fright Night and she did Krampus because she saw them more as black comedies and horror films.
So
Stephen: arguably, everybody’s got something in horror. They like.
Rhys: Yeah, Millie Shapiro plays Charlie, who is the girl she was born in Florida in 2002. She’s got a sister named Abby and her [00:16:00] sister Abby played Dorothy in Doom Patrol.
Stephen: Oh, okay. I was just watching that a while back.
Rhys: Millie’s first professional role was on Broadway playing Matilda in Matilda the Musical.
Heredity snared her 10 award nominations.
Stephen: Woof. Yeah, she was really good. Woof. Woof. Like I said, everybody in this cast was pretty spectacular.
Rhys: And it’s really funny again, spoiler alert, but the marketing for this movie really focused on her purposely as a red herring since she dies in like the first third of the movie.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Like psycho.
Rhys: Yeah. It was her first movie debut too. This is the first movie she did. Gabriel Byrne is an Irish actor who plays the father of the Steve was going
Stephen: to say now there’s a face you don’t see in a lot of horror movies, but he’s been,
Rhys: he was married to [00:17:00] Ellen Barkin. It was an up and smoke and diner and Buckaroo Bonsai.
He had a son named Romy Byrne, who I believe is acting. He’s presently married to Hannah King, who works behind the scenes. And I think she does like costuming or something along those lines. But that’s his present wife. He got one nomination for an award from heredity. He originally started acting on stage.
And he showed up first on television in 1978. He was a regular on a show called the Riordians, which was like an Irish soap opera. Apparently. And then he’s got 112 total titles on his CV, which includes Excalibur. The usual suspects, dead men, the end of violence. Stigmata was a horror film.
Stephen: Yeah. I remember him in the most.
Rhys: Yeah. He was also on ghost ship, which I don’t remember who he played on ghost ship, but he’s in Vikings Lamborghini, the man behind the [00:18:00] and he has three upcoming titles, four letters of love. Ballerina and dance first.
Stephen: Yeah. He’s one of those that you’ve almost assuredly, if you watch movies have seen and he’s always good, but he’s never Tom Cruise in the movie, that Brian Cox kind of level
Rhys: where you instantly recognize him, there’s hardly anything that he’s like the primary star of,
Stephen: And if I know he’s in it, I’ll, I definitely give it a better nod to wanting to go see it. He’s just one of those actors, Tony Collette too. She’s Oh, Tony Collette. Let’s check this one out.
Rhys: Alex Wolf plays Peter. He was born in 1997. Yeah. 1997 in New York city to Pauly Draper, who I don’t know if you ever watched 30 something.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: On ABC. Way back in the day. She was the one with the long straight hair who is married to the main guy who’s, I can’t remember the actor’s name, but it’s on the tip of my [00:19:00] tongue, but he is her son. And his dad is Michael Wolff, who is a jazz pianist. Oh, cool. He’s got a brother, Nat, who also acts and he was in the fault in our stars and death note and also the latest stand mini series.
Stephen: Yeah. Which didn’t do too well.
Rhys: Yeah, Alex got 13 nominations and five wins for his role in Heredity.
Stephen: Yeah. All of these guys deserve all that.
Rhys: Yeah. His he has 38 titles. On his IMDb page, including my big fat Greek wedding to my friend, Dahmer, Jumanji, welcome to the jungle, Jumanji, the next level pig.
And Oppenheimer. He was in recent Oppenheimer. He’s got three upcoming projects untold so long Marianne and a quiet place day one. It’s funny. He’s a huge horror film fan. He’s really excited to be part of the project and he worked [00:20:00] from a method point of view. So he made everybody call him Peter onset, offset He had worked with Gabriel Byrne seven years before.
I can’t remember what, in what film where Gabriel Byrne played his father. Oh, interesting. So he said that he was one of the favorite people he’s ever worked with. He attended a professional children’s school with Milly Shapiro, who plays his sister. Aster said it really worked out well because you had Byrne and Wolf and Shapiro, all who had background together and Tony Collette was the outside one.
And in the family dynamic, it’s the exact same thing.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s nice. That’s cool.
Rhys: Yeah. And Dowd plays Joan she was born in Massachusetts. She has 112 titles on her CV. And you’ve seen her in stuff.
Stephen: Exactly.
Rhys: She was on Philadelphia apt pupil. She actually had a run on law and [00:21:00] order.
So she wasn’t just a guest star. She was probably like some DA or something for a while. Garden state, Marley and me, the handmaid’s tale. She’s got three upcoming projects. The president is missing the undertaker’s children and exorcist believer. She’s in that.
Stephen: Oh yeah. I haven’t seen that one yet.
Rhys: The last member of the cast we’re going to talk about is payment again.
Stephen: Yes. I even made a note. Hey, our payment God is back.
Rhys: Yes. He is the demon du jour for heredity. Just like in last shift. You can listen to our last episode on last shift. If you want to hear a lot of details about him he was supposed to be heralded by trumpeters, which is why there’s always this kind of just noise.
It doesn’t, it’s not necessarily like a trumpet blast, but there’s always like a tone whenever he like comes up or his symbol shown. And I found this out and I never knew this was a thing, but when I had done the research in last shift, I looked up what his symbol was, and it’s these four little curly cues with these two attaching bars on the bottom.[00:22:00]
And then I was looking at heredity and there’s three little curly cues, not four. And I’m like, What the hell, did they get it wrong? It turns out, movies don’t like using the actual demonic symbols in their movies because they think it’s bad luck. Just in case. And the movies that have been like cursed sets.
Oh,
Stephen: interesting.
Rhys: Like The Exorcist. And Rosemary’s baby and the omen, they’ve all been plagued with like bad luck while they were filming. And they used the actual original demonic symbols when they’d made those movies. I was like, Holy cow. It’s like saying Hamlet or Macbeth when you’re in the theater kind of thing.
You just do
Stephen: it whenever you you need to have that symbolism in there as a thing and the cursed set.
Rhys: Yes. This movie, the, my last note before we get into the breakdown, this movie is exhausting and it really is. Yeah. It’s such a great [00:23:00] depiction of, Being in a household where there’s some sort of mental illness going on, that it’s just, it just really weighs on the viewer as you’re watching it.
Stephen: And it’s arguable again. Is it mental illness through the family or is there really some outside force controlling it? And it’s arguable, but I do know at least one person who can’t watch it because using today’s terminology, they get too triggered with all the for sure.
Rhys: I a hundred percent get that.
Okay. We’re going to move. So we don’t end up with a midsummer thing where we have to break it down into two things.
Stephen: There’s a whole lot here.
Rhys: Yeah. So the film starts with Ellen’s obituary on a black background to some very creepy music and the music kind of swells and then cuts. And Ellen is Annie’s mother.
She’s the grandmother of the family. And then you get this ridiculously. Aster [00:24:00] esque shot, because it starts with a shot of the tree house. You see the tree house in the distance, and then there’s a very slow pan across this fine arts film. It reminded me of, here’s her parents asleep in midsummer.
Then it goes to this. Miniature a maquette of a bedroom with a boy lying in a bed and a guy standing at the door and it slowly zooms into that and then seamlessly that becomes live. Yes. Which is just brilliant.
Stephen: And. This I’ve got a couple more comments about this, but Annie is making these for an art project, a gallery makes the miniature houses scenes, but she uses like real scenes from her life in that, which I think is a little creepy on its own, first of all, but there’s a connection symbolism there because throughout the movie you’re constantly you.
Getting these scenes in the house where [00:25:00] they shoot them, where it’s feeling like you’re looking into a miniature house. Like it’s not the real world. It’s a miniature house. And as the movie progresses, the outside shots start going from, yeah, this is real woods in house too. Is that a miniature that we’re looking at?
And so the symbolism is again, is all of this really happening or is it just portrayed in somebody’s head? And I think that adds to it, arguably.
Rhys: Or Is this you’re going through your life thinking you’re doing things of your own free will, but there might be some master artists who’s above the whole thing, who is building your life around you, just like Annie is doing with those.
Yes.
Stephen: Yeah. And there’s a couple other scenes where the miniature houses are like in the background and she has them all over the freaking house, it’s really weird, but there are several scenes where it’s like, You’re it’s you’re looking at a miniature. So yeah, what is there is, are we looking through payment’s eyes and controlling them?
Rhys: That [00:26:00] whole opening pan and push takes a minute and 48 seconds from when it starts. So very asterisk. He just loves that nice, slow move around.
Stephen: And it’s very effective. I even made a note, the whole opening sets, the scenery, getting ready for the funeral and that whole opening stuff is really good at setting up the whole movie.
And
Rhys: it is brilliant because it shows the character so well, like Steve who’s Gabrielle Byrne’s character, the father he walks into Peter’s room to get him ready to go. He is the nurturer. He is the one that does things to keep the family. On task moving forward. Yeah. Because the mom
Stephen: already sitting in the car waiting and I’m like, wow, what mother does that?
And then I’m like I know of at least one that used to do that type of stuff.
Rhys: Yeah. It introduces the oddity that is Charlie. She’s not in her room. She slept, spent the night in the tree house. She wakes up being ridiculously dazed and confused as [00:27:00] what’s going on. That’s her character throughout the entire movie just displayed right there.
Stephen: Yeah. And, arguably, does she have some thing? Is she autistic or, you don’t, aren’t, you don’t know what is really going on with her throughout most of the movie. Yep.
Rhys: And then you have Annie sitting in the car. She’s the member of the family. Who’s outside separate walled off from everybody else.
And she’s agonizes over everything. And she’s agonizing over the fact that everyone’s running late and it’s
Stephen: The only time she feels at ease with life is making the models when she has control of those little models and what she’s making. But she loses that throughout the movie. And as her life turns upside down, that gets harder for her to be a part of that or, feel comfortable with that.
Rhys: Yeah. Then you’re at the funeral services. Annie’s surprised at how many people are there. She doesn’t even know half these people and they’re all there and it, she brings up this trauma that existed between her and her mother’s [00:28:00] wearing a payment symbol on her necklace. Annie is wearing a payment symbol on her necklace, but she doesn’t even know what it means.
Stephen: And it’s like the world’s most uncomfortable. Thing during the, what she says during the funeral.
Rhys: Yeah. Yeah. You get the feeling that she’s not a very social person
Stephen: and that she wasn’t close to her mother and she doesn’t know
Rhys: what to say at all. Oh, and it gets even worse because as you go on, you find out not only is she not close to her mother, they just flat out, didn’t like each other and her mother moved into their house, which is Holy cow.
How awkward is that gotta be?
Stephen: Yeah. And yeah, there’s more with that, like when they showed the mother’s room later, cause there’s like a bed and nothing else in the room, it’s like worse,
Rhys: yeah. Charlie is going through the line and she looks back and there’s this creepy guy just sitting there looking at her smiling, which.
Ordinarily it’s Oh, pedo, but it’s all because [00:29:00] that guy’s a member of the cult and he sees her and he recognizes her and she’s someone important. She’s sitting there drawing while she’s sitting there before Steve, the guy who’s supposed to make sure everything runs smoothly is like, no, that’s not polite.
It’s doing company and closes her book.
Stephen: I see. I took it more because when the kids were little. We would let them color and draw and stuff because it kept them occupied and quiet and they weren’t disruptive, quiet. And I took it more as what she was drawing bothered him and he just wanted to ignore it and cover it up.
Rhys: He works in the psychiatric profession somehow. They don’t really go into too much detail about what he does. There’s been some fan speculation that he was actually Tony Annie’s. Psychiatrists and they had a romantic thing afterwards. And
Stephen: that’s interesting.
Rhys: Yeah. But in this whole opening scene, again, we get two important parts about Charlie.
One, she has a nervous tick where she makes a clicking noise. Yep. And it becomes really big throughout the thing too. She’s allergic to nuts. [00:30:00] Because there’s a, there’s some kind of snack there. She’s eating the snack, her mom and her dad are both like, are there nuts in there? And she’s no. And, going on from that.
She carries chocolate with
Stephen: her.
Rhys: She likes chocolate. Yeah. You’re back home again, Steve reinforcing, I’m the guy, everyone take your shoes off when you come inside, so he’s got the rules for keeping the house up. He’s consoling Annie when she comes in, doesn’t touch her, but how are you doing?
How are you feeling? He is the maintenance man of the family is there to make sure things run smoothly. He does go in and he checks in on Peter. You get to see how everyone processes their grief. Steve mother hens, everybody, Peter smokes down or plays music. Or just ignores it.
Annie doubles down doing tons and tons of work on her miniatures and Charlie internalizes everything. And then does these art crafty kind of projects?
Stephen: Yeah. She’s making little toys and constructing things.
Rhys: [00:31:00] Yeah. Yeah. You do have this one rare moment where Annie is there with Charlie and like consoling her she says that Charlie was Ellen, her mother’s favorite, and she Charlie’s she always wanted me to be a boy.
Charlie worries about the mortality of her caregivers. She’s that who’s going to take care of me when you die.
Stephen: And it was just disturbing. But it also really seemed, and you find out more about this as it goes on, but Annie never felt super close to her daughter. And always felt that her mother.
Took her daughter away and it’s like now mom’s dead. So now we can be mother and daughter and doesn’t really go the way she wants.
Rhys: So there’s this whole thing and we’ll get to it later where the cult wants to bring payment into the world. He needs to possess a body to bring it into the world.
And if the cult manages to do that. They are rewarded with riches and secrets,
Stephen: right? Yeah. Who wouldn’t want to do that on a Saturday night?
Rhys: Sure. [00:32:00] And so Ellen, the high priestess of the cult decided that you find out she tried it on her son and that didn’t work, he killed himself. So she wanted to do it to Peter, but Annie wouldn’t let her anywhere near Peter.
And so as a consolation, she let her work with Charlie. And so she was going to put the spirit of payment in Charlie, but payment doesn’t like being in a girl.
Yeah.
Stephen: That, that, that whole stay away from my son, but you can do whatever you want with my daughter. I wonder why she’s all messed up. There’s a lot of problems with that.
Rhys: Yeah. And there’s this thing where they push in on the scene. Tony Collette notices it written on the wall is the word satiny S A S. T O N Y there are four words written on walls throughout this film. And satiny is supposedly a power word used to speak to the dead, to command them back into the world of the living.
[00:33:00] But I thought it was interesting cause there are these words hidden written on the walls four times throughout the movie, three times, four words, and it’s like the writings on the wall. You know what I mean?
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Good point.
Rhys: So she heads into her, Annie heads into her own studio. She’s looking through a box of photos and she finds this book.
And there’s a note from her mom apologizing and promising great rewards in the end. And the note says, please don’t hate me and try not to despair your losses. You will see in the end that they were worth it.
Stephen: Yeah. That’s such a weirdly worded. Note, and just as disturbing as everything else, the whole thing.
She gets mad, walks
Rhys: over, closes up the box, turns the lights out and it’s really dark and she’s looking off in the corner and she freaks out and says, turns the light on. And there’s nothing there. She says, mom, there’s actually, and you really have to look for it. You have to really dig, but there’s a [00:34:00] smiling figure in the corner, in the darkness, all you can really see is the smile and maybe some eyes, but it’s so hard to see,
Stephen: it is especially with the digital on my TV.
Rhys: Yeah. And then she goes through this whole diorama that she’s working on. Which is her with the baby Charlie and her mother there with her breast out, like her mother’s going to start breastfeeding baby Charlie.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah.
Rhys: Which is pretty disturbing.
Stephen: Yeah. Again, all the little scenes she puts, I’m sure a psychologist could say she’s.
Trying to stay, trying to not think about this stuff, but it’s coming out in her art, it’s, things are bothering her and it’s coming out.
Rhys: Yeah. She does, she goes to bed and she admits to Steve that she scared herself, it’s not a big deal. It’s I’m trying to think what movie you were saying, but how many times have you like seen [00:35:00] something out of the corner of your eye and you just like.
Ignore it. You like make up some excuse and then just go about your day. The next day, Charlie is busted for not doing her school work because she’s building a toy. And then a bird hits the window hard, really hard. And the class freaks out. Charlie doesn’t even react, but she’s, her eye lands on a pair of scissors on the teacher’s desk.
Stephen: Yes. And this is again, already been several clues as to what, but Arguably, what does things mean? So was she upset and she drew the bird into its death or was there another reason the bird hit the window with the room Charlie was in or at that moment? Again, wonderful job directing and story it’s here’s something that happened, here’s what I’m thinking.
I met, but I’m not going to explicitly tell you. And, that’s fantastic job all throughout this movie for that.
Rhys: Yeah. Peter’s in literature class. They’re talking about Heracles and the concept of the fatal [00:36:00] flaw. He’s busy staring at Bridget’s ass. She’s sitting in front of him. And she’s saying that his fatal flaw was arrogance because there are all these signs telling Heracles about his demise and he ignores them all because he thinks he’s above it, which is really the whole.
Cool. Theme of this movie,
Stephen: exactly what I put right there.
Rhys: Yeah. And then the teacher asks this question, is it more or less tragic in Sophocles play the fact that Heracles his demise was predetermined. So is it more tragic because he didn’t have any choices or is it less tragic because no, it didn’t make any difference what choice he made it.
It was going to happen anyways. Peter’s barely listening. He’s looking at Bridget’s butt and his buddy is making plans with him to smoke down during break in between classes. And that same theme with Sophocles is the same theme that they discussed in class in the very first Halloween movie. [00:37:00]
Stephen: Oh,
Rhys: interesting.
Okay. A nice little tie into Charlie is now outside. She’s eating a Cadbury bar and there’s a dead bird and she cuts his head off with a pair of scissors. Like you do. Okay.
There’s some strange lady outside the fence who’s watching her do it. And the ladies doesn’t seem upset by it at all. In fact, she seems to be smiling. So yeah, mutilate that, that corpse, their little girl, it’s a new, yeah. And he starts researching paranormal apparitions online, which is always a great place to get all of your information about the paranormal, right?
Steve comes home and Annie looks in her mom’s old room and notices there’s a triangle painted on the floor
Stephen: like burnt.
Rhys: Yes. This upsets her. So she has Steve lock up her mom’s bedroom. He gets a call from the cemetery finding out that Ellen’s grave has been desecrated. But he doesn’t say anything to Annie about that.
She says she’s going to go see a movie. Which is actually hiding where she’s really going from Steve.
Stephen: She’s actually [00:38:00] Might have been better off
Rhys: going to the movie. Yeah, but she goes to a group counseling session, which is not a bad idea.
Stephen: No, it’s supposed to be helpful.
Rhys: Yeah. And there’s this, they’re doing this group counseling session for people who lost a loved one and they ask her if she wants to speak and she says no.
And then she starts talking and there’s this nice asterisk slow push into her while she’s sitting in her chair, talking about all this crap. That she had to go through. Ellen had a disassociate identity dysphoria where she thought she was somebody else and dementia. Her father ended up starving himself to death because of psychotic depression.
And her brother was schizophrenic, killing himself by hanging himself in a closet and blaming. Ellen for putting people inside him, which is what she was trying to do. She’s trying to get payment too. So there’s this whole pan into her and then she’s she kept Peter from Ellen and she basically gave [00:39:00] her Charlie and she really did not like her mom and then it goes to the counselor.
Because she says she’s being blamed and it shows the counselor and often one side, just not even central way off on the left hand side of the screen is Joan. She’s just sitting there. She’s just one person in the crowd. And then she says she feels she’s feeling blamed and it starts to pan out as she steps away from the emotions that she just got in touch with during the whole slow pan in, and then it pulls back out.
So she doesn’t know what she’s being blamed for. She is. An amazing actress in the scene.
Stephen: It is. It’s like a non cut scene. It’s long. And it’s almost an info dump to get you up to speed where things are at, but it doesn’t feel like it at all. And it’s information that is helpful. But my one thought was, wow.
Which actually the thing you said earlier is Oh, okay. But it’s wow, Gabriel burns character [00:40:00] knew all of this and he still wanted to marry her. I guess it makes sense if he was her counselor, cause I was like, yeah, run dude.
Rhys: Yeah. Her performance just in that scene is just so good. Peter is smoking down in his room.
He gets a test about a text about a party at Aaron’s. He blows his smoke out the window, so it’s not smelling up his room and they show it from the outside. And then you can see breath as somebody is hanging out in the trees, watching him through the window.
Stephen: Yes. Which I didn’t catch the first time I saw the movies.
Super
Rhys: subtle. Yes. Yeah. Charlie is on the other hand, crafting things, with dead bird heads and things like that. And she’s clicking and snacking, it’s a whole thing, but there’s a light that shows up a shimmering light and then it kind of disperses around the room and she’s like looking at it and following it.
That becomes [00:41:00] a symbol. It’s when someone hacks your computer in a movie, there’s a line of code that shows up or whenever the ghost goes past the camera glitz is out. This is their way of saying that the supernatural entity is present in the room, that this light shimmer.
Stephen: And it’s done in a way that.
Again, you could argue that she’s having a break from reality. She’s having a mental episode because those types of things get reported. People see a light or something. Yeah. So it was again, is it this or that? Question on all those scenes with that.
Rhys: Yeah. Andy’s cutting up some tomatoes.
She’s getting texts from the gallery saying, Hey, how’s everything going? Are you going to be ready for the show? Charlie takes the bird head and she starts walking out into the woods of Utah.
Stephen: Casually strolling.
Rhys: Yeah. While Annie’s working in her gallery, Peter comes up and wants to borrow the car.
There’s a school thing. He claims there’s a party, the [00:42:00] barbecue for school and Annie brilliant first. She’s is there going to be any drinking? And he’s no, it’s a school thing.
Stephen: We’re getting high.
Rhys: Why are
Stephen: we drinking?
Rhys: Yeah, so then she’s are you taking Charlie? Because it’s a school thing.
So your sister’s a student there, and all of a sudden he’s in a tight spot.
Stephen: Yeah first of all, that’s the worst lie. You would have mentioned it earlier in the week, dude. It wouldn’t be sprung upon you on a Friday night. No parent believes it.
Rhys: I’m just going over
Stephen: to Steve’s
Rhys: house.
Stephen: And, come on.
It’s a high school thing. Why would you take the middle schooler with you to all the high school event?
Rhys: Yeah, she’s accusatory and he’s pretty defensive for, all the more this conversation is supposed to be. Yeah. Charlie, who’s out in the middle of the woods, sees this clearing and Ellen is sitting in the clearing and there’s fire on both sides of her.
And it turns out that’s just something for Charlie to see because Annie shows up and Annie doesn’t see any of that.
Stephen: Which [00:43:00] then I had another thing besides two questions arise from this movie that have come up in other movies. It’s not original is how do you tell the difference between someone who’s possessed by a demon and somebody who has a mental illness?
How do you tell that difference? And the other thing, especially with this movie is how do you convince somebody else of what is reality? Because You know, is what she’s seen real or is it just real to her or is it totally hallucinatory? Yeah, you could have a very long discussion on all three of those.
Rhys: Yeah And Annie’s whole problem first is like you’re going to this party with Peter and then she’s mad because Not because her daughter is just walking around with a dead bird head out in the middle of a field because she wasn’t wearing shoes.
Stephen: You
Rhys: can’t come out here in your bare feet. What in the world?
We cut to the car and Peter’s driving and he naturally doesn’t look happy. Charlie’s sitting in the back, clicking, and [00:44:00] There’s this shot where he drives past and you can see the car coming and there’s a telephone pole and it becomes the central point of the shot as the camera follows the car, then it stops when the car goes past the pole.
And if you look on the pole is the payment symbol.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: This poll is going to play a part.
Stephen: Yeah. That wasn’t subtle at all.
Rhys: No. It’s quite the party again. I don’t know what kind of parties these guys went to in high school. I had never been to a part as an adult. I’ve never been to a party that looks like that.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a little off the wall. There’s so many kids with drinking and yeah. And then the chocolate cake comes up here in a moment. It’s go get chocolate cakes. Dude, how do you know for sure what’s in that chocolate cake? You’re telling your sister to go eat. Yeah. Cause
Rhys: there’s specifically a shot of a girl chopping up walnuts in the kitchen.
Stephen: But you’re there to smoke weed. How do you know that’s just a plain chocolate cake that at this party? [00:45:00] That was my first thought other than the walnuts.
Rhys: Yeah. Annie is busy setting up a diorama with her mom coming into the bedroom. Peter’s with Bridget. He’s Hey, I brought some weed.
And she’s oh, there’s a bong upstairs. So he’s thinking, oh, cool. Just a little one on one time with me and Bridget. No, there’s two other guys in the room. They’re just thrilled that he brought.
Stephen: Weed, it’s that type of party.
Rhys: Yeah. And Charlie’s Peter, where are you going? Don’t leave me alone.
Blah, blah, blah. And he’s go eat some cake. Look, they have cake. Just go. She’s I don’t know anybody. She’s just stand there. They’ll give you cake. It’s great. So they go upstairs to smoke down and she goes over and has some cake loaded up with walnuts and comes in and says, Charlie, I feel funny.
My throat is getting bigger.
Stephen: Which is a weird thing to say.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: And, coming up, there’s a point where char or where Alex wills character he has an allergic reaction while smoking with some friends under the bleachers. And that’s why I said Maybe there [00:46:00] was the same type of thing in the cake and it wasn’t just that, maybe what’s in this weed that these kids are having these allergic reactions to.
But at that point, and I know I’m jumping ahead a little bit, that point, Charlie’s no longer with us. Everything’s a spoiler. So deal with it. But you then get the focus on Peter. And he has the same reaction. So it’s like her spirit go into him is what I started questioning during that scene.
They actually use Charlie’s spirit to drive a lot of stuff
Rhys: throughout this movie. And actually I find it very fascinating. She said her throat’s getting bigger because. From a medical perspective, that’s exactly what’s happening, because your esophagus is swelling. It’s actually, your trachea is swelling.
It’s actually getting bigger, which isn’t what you would naturally think. You’re like, Oh, it’s shrinking. It’s getting smaller, but no, the tissue is swelling. It’s getting bigger.
Stephen: It’s just The, the choice to put that line in there that way is just one of those disturbing items in the whole thing.
Rhys: [00:47:00] Yeah, he grabs her, he runs out the car, runs out of the house, puts her in the backseat of the car. He’s we’ll be at the hospital takes off 911. You know what I mean? And EMT has that stuff in his bag.
Stephen: Yeah. And they’re driving and it’s so desolate and dark and he’s turning on roads. There’s nothing around.
I’m like, your God is Ian Deerfield in Mahoning County or something. What hospital, what hospitals
Rhys: out here? She does this whole thing, which is actually cool. She puts the window down and sticks your head out because it’s forcing the air down her throat. And it’s cool, which helps. Yeah. But then there’s a deer in the road all of a sudden and he swerves to miss it.
Kudos to him for not losing control of the car.
Stephen: He drove it exactly where they wanted him to drive it.
Rhys: He did. And Charlie’s head hits that pole and comes right off.
Stephen: That had to be one of the most disturbing scenes ever in a movie.
Rhys: They [00:48:00] worked so hard to get that to work. So well, and it, I think it said it was like one of the first takes they did.
It came out that well, and it’s actually based on a true story.
Stephen: Oh, yeah.
Rhys: Isn’t that jacked up? Yeah, that is a couple guys. It might’ve been in Florida or somewhere down south, Florida, man, at a party, getting drunk, the one guy driving home, or the guy that hangs his head out the window, it takes his head off.
The guy just parks the car and goes inside and leaves the body. Which is exactly what Peter does.
Stephen: Yeah. It does sound like Florida.
Rhys: Yeah. He goes home and just goes to bed. He’s in complete shock. Oh yeah. Oh, he just killed your sister. Annie finds the body the entire time that this scene happens where Annie finds the body in the car.
The camera is on Peter’s face. You don’t even get to see her find it. You just hear it. And it reminded me of Danny when she gets the call. [00:49:00] Not Danny. When Danny’s boyfriend gets the call from her, it’s just her wailing. And that’s exactly what Tony Collette is doing when she finds Charlie,
Stephen: it definitely.
Almost I don’t want to say art house, but it definitely had a different feel than a big normal blockbuster movie which would have You know, you follow the mom you show this that it definitely set a tone and mood way different and better in my opinion than And
Rhys: if you think it’s because he was shying away from the gore of a headless body, nope, he cuts straight to Charlie’s head on the road with ants crawling all over it.
Stephen: Yeah, you just did the scene where her head got snapped off. You’re not shying away from anything.
Rhys: Yeah. And then we cut back to Steve trying to comfort Annie again, the maintenance man trying to work to, cover this up and there’s a storm in the background, like the weather turned nasty and [00:50:00] Peter is just all isolated in the dark, all by himself.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah I felt for that kid right here a lot.
Rhys: Yeah. And the burial super cool. The shot with the mountains in the background, the blue sky, Andy, just wailing the whole time, Peter being completely dissociative, just standing there staring away. And then the camera follows the coffin as it’s lowered into the ground.
That’s such a cool shot.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like a miniature because you would see the cutaway in a miniature, it’s just now a lot of the scenes make you think that you’re looking at a miniature rather than the actual real life.
Rhys: Yeah. The funeral dinners at the house, Peter’s looking through distorted glass, just like his world is.
Rapidly becoming and he’s collapsed on the bed. Steve seeing to the guests, seeing to the get together, locking the house up when everything’s done. He goes into the bedroom and [00:51:00] written on the wall is the word Zazos, which is used to summon a demon. And that was the thing that somebody had said, Hey.
When they were talking to Ari Aster, they’re like, Hey, that word Zazus that was written on the wall. Did somebody say that when they were doing the ritual? And he’s yes, exactly.
Stephen: I had a little note. This is the dark humor. Obviously Peter was in shock walking into the house and going to bed and all that.
Really? What would you say? Mom, dad, the good news is Charlie’s not having trouble breathing anymore. That was like the dark humor going through my head, watching that scene. It was very powerful.
Rhys: The old driver’s head instructor in me says, you just call the police and you just wait there.
Stephen: Yeah, but
Rhys: the
Stephen: police will deal with
Rhys: telling your mom about
Stephen: it. I would not. And be that whatsoever.
Rhys: No. So Peter goes to bed and there’s a red light on in the tree house. You’re wondering what it is. It turns out it’s [00:52:00] Annie. She’s sleeping in the tree house. Cause that’s where Charlie used to sleep and their space heaters.
And that’s what the red light is.
Stephen: And I must say again, that doesn’t look like what it would actually look like. If there was space heaters in there, it looks more like what a model would look like a little. Yeah,
Rhys: you’re right. Yeah. Peter’s back at school. There’s that whole Ari Aster muffled sound thing.
Cause every noise going around him. He’s he keeps seeing a rear view mirror that pops up and then he looks up and it’s gone. Bridget’s looking at him concerned. And then he finally actually grieves for his sister while he’s smoking weed under the bleachers with his friends, as he like starts to experience what she experienced that night.
Stephen: So is there something in the weed in this town or is she inhabiting his body? Is he just portraying his feelings by, mimicking what happened to her? A lot of things could be here.
Rhys: This movie does a great job with having creepy stuff. And this next scene is one of [00:53:00] them. He is riding a bicycle now home from school.
He just drops his bike. And stands outside the house trying to get the courage to go in and face his parents again. Doesn’t notice that his mom is sitting motionless in the car. And I’m like, that is just creepy.
Stephen: That was super creepy. But again, it looked a lot like her models that she makes. Yeah.
With the scenes, yeah. Still the way the angles too. Give that,
Rhys: yeah. He goes in, she starts the car up, and she goes to group therapy, but she doesn’t go in. She can’t bring herself to go in. She sees Joan as she’s trying to leave, and Joan tells her this story that her son died, and her grandson.
They both drown. And Joan gives her number, and she goes home. Steve’s trying to be comforting and she just keeps basically running away from him saying, I need to sleep. And she keeps going out to sleep in the tree house.
Stephen: Everybody’s displaying typical, problems, mental illness problems.
Yep.
Rhys: And we’re hitting our silos where we’re no longer [00:54:00] communicating. And Peter’s looking at the lights in the tree house from his room. And he hears Charlie click behind him and what? And he spills paint on Joan’s number, which reminded me of audition. Remember in audition, he spills coffee on her resume, right?
And it’s not the only audition reference I picked up on in this movie. And he goes to Jones and there’s this doormat that looks just like the ones her mom used to make. That’s crazy. She tells the story about discovering the body and then she’s drinking this tea and there’s this scene where she like goes like this and wipes.
And there’s something on her finger. It turns out it’s meant to be Dittany of Crete, which is an herb that is supposed to make you susceptible to possession. And if you look at the photos of Ellen holding Charlie, there’s black flecks in the milk bottle that she’s feeding her. Which ties into the stuff that’s in the tea.
Stephen: [00:55:00] Oh man. I didn’t see that. That’s even, that’s crazy. He’s very deep with his stuff.
Rhys: He is. Peter is, oh, she’s telling about this. She sleepwalks and apparently woke up one time standing there with Peter and Charlie sharing a bed. They were covered in paint thinner and she had just struck a match and she can’t convince the kids that she was just sleepwalking.
I don’t think that matters to me that you were sleepwalking or not. I’d say it’s almost did die.
Stephen: Yeah that, yeah.
Rhys: And he’s in her studio. She’s doing a model of Charlie’s death, complete with pole car head on the ground. It’s just, it’s not happy about it. Yeah. It’s just a neutral view. Steve’s not happy. He’s Oh, what’s Peter going to think? And she’s it’s not about him. And he, Steve’s just lost his patience with her.
And it is the most. Uncomfortable dinner in the history of cinema.
Stephen: Just the fact that you recreated that scene that there [00:56:00] for all the disturbing stuff in the movie, that. Tops the list, probably out of everything, the, it was just, yeah.
Rhys: There’s a whole lot of silence and finally Peter breaks it by trying to have a normal conversation with Steve and Annie scoffs at something and Peter’s you have something to say.
And it’s one of those things. Don’t ask if you don’t want to hear. And so she does she just goes off on him. And then he calls her out on, Hey, I didn’t want to take her in the first place. You pushed her on me. And then Steve’s we’re shutting it all down. Everyone just stop.
Stephen: Yeah. If he was a psychologist, he’s not a really great one because he wants to just damp everything down and not talk about it.
Rhys: It’s very very different when it’s in your house as opposed to in your office,
Stephen: yeah, I guess so.
Rhys: And he goes to the craft store to buy some balsa wood. And she sees Joan on her way out and Joan is all excited. She went to a seance and it really worked. And Annie, you’ve got to try this.
Come over [00:57:00] and check it out. And first Annie’s laughing it off. And then she seems disturbed by the natural progression of what she’s saying. And then she goes to Joan’s. Yeah. And Joan just keeps going. Even though Annie’s basically having a complete breakdown over what is actually happening during the seance, Joan doesn’t care.
She’s still going. And that whole thing with the chalk on the chalkboard, that’s a practical effect. It was a magnet in the chalk and then a magnet under the table, dragging the chalk around, which was actually cool. It reminded me a lot. The gas lighting in midsummer where she’s no, this is good.
No. I took him to the train station. I’ll come back. He’ll come back for you. This is true.
Stephen: And this whole thing that she’s doing this seance and getting communication from the other side and wanting them to stay and calling them back and Annie’s freaked out a little bit, [00:58:00] obviously But it’s like anyone who listens to this podcast and watches horror movies.
Have you ever seen a horror movie where those things go good? That’s every single one is it’s not the real person. It’s a demon. It’s something bad. This is not a good thing. It never is.
Rhys: As she’s driving home, she hears a Charlie click in the car with her, and it freaks her out.
Stephen: And they fit right in with the little bit of disturbing music noise, and then there’s silence, and they stand out.
They do make that sound as disturbing as possible.
Rhys: Yeah, this next scene is actually a dream sequence, but it’s goofy as shit is in this movie. You’re not really even sure of it until like she wakes up because she sees ants crawling along the wall. She follows the ants and they’re all over Peter’s face.
Like ants completely covering his face and all of a sudden she’s sleepwalking again in his room,
Stephen: right? And it looked a lot like what Charlie’s face looked like after [00:59:00] yes
Rhys: telephone pole He’s understandably upset and then she just blurts out. I never wanted to be your mother Yeah, and then she covers her mouth and then she’s like she tried to have She Not an abortion, but she tried to basically cause something.
He’s you tried to kill me. And then all of a sudden they’re both wet. And that’s when you’re like, Oh, this is a dream. Cause all of a sudden they’re just doused in stuff and she’s holding a lit match and then she wakes up.
Stephen: Now she said probably one of the most important lines. That’s a clue in that whole monologue there.
She says, I was trying to save you. But it’s done quickly and other things happen. There’s no focus on it, but that is that’s where you go. Maybe she isn’t the crazy one as much as we want to think.
Rhys: There’s actually an interesting fan theory we’ll get to at the end. She goes downstairs and does the incantation for the seance.
Then she wakes up Peter. She apologizes. She seems a little [01:00:00] manic, but like almost a caring person again. Steve is super rational. He doesn’t want anything to do with it. Peter is like, Hey, we’re like acting as a family. Let’s just go ahead. And then all of a sudden it’s you don’t feel that you don’t feel the air flexing yeah.
And it’s important to note that both Peter and Annie are the only two of her Charlie’s clicks, Steve has not. So he’s not really in tune to this whole thing. And then just Steve looks completely dis complete disbelief. Peter is utter terror. And then Annie’s like Charlie, what’s wrong? And then she starts to speak with Charlie’s voice.
And she’s what’s going on? What’s going on? And the dog sitting there barking at them. Everything’s all freaking out until Steve takes a pitcher of water and dumps it on Annie and breaks the whole spell.
Stephen: And she’s what’s going on? Upset. You have a pitcher of water just sitting around your house, Steve.
A weird thing [01:01:00] that I think he ran out to the kitchen. I’ll, so I’ll give him that. Now, one thing I did catch here. Before the sounds was when he was, moving into the whole area, the one sculpture they have sitting in the foyer area, it’s like a miniature house, but as you go by, it’s stages of a house.
It’s as you go further down, it gets more degraded
Rhys: on top of each other.
Stephen: Yeah. Like the foundation is corrupt and what up top is good. I was like, that’s pretty cool.
Rhys: Yeah. On the wall is written the words Liftock Pandonium. Liftock is a Hebrew word, which means open up. Pandonium comes from the Greek pan meaning all and demonium meaning demon.
The phrase together is open up all demons. Everybody should have that. Peter is up all night. Then he’s sitting in class and he sees the creepy light, the light reflection that Charlie saw. And he gets a phone [01:02:00] call. It’s Steve bitching out Annie because of the seance. She is incredulous that he’s mad at her.
She doesn’t get why he’s mad at her and he can’t talk to her that way. And then the gallery calls and leaves a message. The message from the gallery is like, Hey, just making sure everything’s okay. Can we help you? That was actually Ari Aster. That was his voice on the phone. That was his little cameo.
Oh, cool. Steve and Peter come home. They mentioned something about a smell. What does that smell? Steve heads into the studio and sees that all of the dioramas that Annie’s been working on, she smashed them all.
Stephen: So I guess she’s not going to the gallery.
Rhys: That absolutely puts him over the edge. He’s fine.
And he just hypermedicates himself. And goes to sleep on the couch. It’s important that he, hypermedicates himself because stuff happens. You’re like, why wouldn’t he wake up for that? He took a lot of drugs before he went down and he’s following these scribbling noises and finds a sketchbook, [01:03:00] finds Charlie sketchbook in her room, drawing by itself, and it’s just pictures of Peter’s face over and over again.
Charlie. You have a Charlie click in Peter’s room, but he’s asleep. So that’s like the whole thing from last shift, where they’re showing you the demons that she’s not saying to let you know, it’s not all in her head.
Stephen: Yeah. You start questioning what is real a lot.
Rhys: The click wakes him up and he sees her across the room.
And then all of a sudden her head looks like it’s falling off and it turns into a ball that rolls to him and the dog won’t come in the room. It’s standing outside. It’s barking. And then all of a sudden hands, grab his head and start pulling and it’s Annie, except it’s not, he says it was Annie pulling on her head.
He’s no, it wasn’t me. And certainly don’t tell your dad about this.
Stephen: Yeah. You question she’s crazy. We see she’s crazy. Did she really do it? And she doesn’t even know she did it.
Rhys: Yeah. She takes [01:04:00] that book, lights a fire and throws the sketchbook onto the fire. As it starts to burn, she starts to burn.
Stephen: Yeah, that’s not good.
Rhys: Yeah. So she pulls it out of the fire and stamps it out. And the fire on her instantly goes out. Peter goes back to school and he watches him leave. And then she heads to Joan cause something’s not right. She knows something’s not right. There’s an upside down shot.
Stephen: Yeah, that was a pretty incredible shot.
Definitely again, made me think of models.
Rhys: Yeah. Joan’s not home. She’s knocking the camera shows you from inside Joan’s house. It is all set for an altar. There’s Peter’s photo and a triangle carved on the dining room table, animal heads on the table, looking up at Charlie’s robot toy that has a bird head with a crown on it.
It’s just a bunch of really disturbing visuals.
Stephen: Yeah. If you thought Joni was a friend yeah, no.
Rhys: Yeah. That’s gone now. Peter’s outside at school eating [01:05:00] something and then he hears Joan and he looks and he sees her and she’s only speaking into his head because no one else hears it. And she’s just trying to get his spirit out of his body to make room for payment.
And she’s Peter, get out. I cast you out. How
Stephen: disturbing is that?
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool. And I noticed too, in that scene, the way Joan was standing and with the light behind her, It looked a lot like the little mother model that Annie put into the doll house looking into the bedroom. It was like the same pose and everything.
Rhys: Yeah, a lot of people are saying that it’s not actually her. It’s her, she’s astrally projecting herself. So she’s not really there,
Stephen: which makes sense for what’s going on.
Rhys: Back at home, Annie finds the book of payment. And. It’s not really the book of payment as a book in spirits, but it’s talking about payment.
I wrote the whole article out that’s in [01:06:00] there. And it basically says that payment can inhabit a female’s body, but payment prefers a male’s body and don’t make him mad because if you do bad things will happen to you.
Stephen: Wow. When’s that go start these damn misogynistic demons.
Rhys: And he then finds a photo album of the cult and as she’s flipping through it, Joan’s in there and there’s pictures of her family on the wall and her mom is doing stuff like spells in front of the picture.
And it’s oh, okay, now things aren’t cool.
Stephen: That looked like the most happy scene in the whole movie.
Rhys: Peter’s in school and there’s the light show down the hall. The lights are reappeared leading him down the hall. Steve is in the office and gets an email about the desecrated grave. And they get pictures of it and you can see they just dug up Ellen’s body.
It’s not just desecrated like they kicked the stone over, like they dug her whole body up. Annie [01:07:00] opens the attic access. And there’s flies all over the place, and up there is her mother’s body. Headless, the skin’s turned black, there’s a big payment sign carved in the rafters right above it.
Stephen: Yeah, there’s a lot of headless going on in this movie.
Yes. Decapitation is a big theme. Yeah. Washington Irving would probably like it.
Rhys: Yeah. I’m back at school. We’re learning about Iphigenia and her murder was commanded by the gods. And that does that make it right? And then there’s this something written on the board that says punishment brings wisdom, which I thought, Oh that’s what everyone’s going for here.
Just only one guy’s getting punished.
Stephen: Yeah. Is this where Peter like really freaks out in the middle of this man, that kid did such a great job because after he like fell onto the floor and kicked the desk away, he was like, Not only was he just screaming, but he’s like kicking his legs and jerky little motions that just really brought it out like panic.
Rhys: [01:08:00] Yeah.
Stephen: I thought it was fantastic.
Rhys: He hears Charlie clicks all around him and then his arm goes up and it’s twisted and then he bashes his head on the desk. It was a foam pad desk. The guy, the actor wanted to like do multiple takes and wanted it to be more rigid and they’re like, no, we’re not doing that.
We got it this time. Don’t do any more. Wow. The whole, and I thought this was really cool. The entire class, like recoils and fear from him freaking out. But one guy standing up there recording it on his phone. I’m like, that is a statement on society if I’ve ever heard it. So then we’re panning through the house or is it a model?
We don’t know. Yeah. We’re to that point where you can’t tell what is fake and what is not anymore.
Stephen: Yeah, the pace really picks up.
Rhys: No one’s home, Annie is out in the rain, headed to the treehouse. There’s this call to [01:09:00] Steve that something happened at the school. He’s on his way to the school, he stops at a traffic light and has a little breakdown in the car.
Allows himself just a minute or two to grieve the shit that is his current situation.
Stephen: Yeah.
Rhys: He shows up at home, he’s carrying Peter in and he meets him at the car. He puts he puts him in bed. He’s medicated him. Cause again, he’s a doctor of some sort. She tells him about the body in the attic.
She is completely manic now. She has reason to be, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying he’s crazy women. No, she’s got all kinds of reasons.
Stephen: And the weird thing is in a lot of ways here at the end, she’s more lucid and in touch with reality than the beginning.
Rhys: Yes He did the same thing in Midsommar where you had all of these characters whose lives were falling apart and one was getting clearer as Danny became more.
The same thing happens here. Everyone else starts to fall apart and Annie actually becomes like [01:10:00] the lucid, clear thinking person. Yeah. Cause she’s right. Yes. She tells him about the attic he goes up and from as a rational mental health person, he has every reason to think that she desecrated her mother’s own grave.
She put the thing up there. She’s been lying about going to movies and stuff. And. He’s this is, you’re having a mental breakdown. That’s all this is. You are having a mental breakdown and she definitely has enough family history going on that she should be having a mental breakdown, yeah.
Yeah. She’s take this book. It’s all tied to this book. I tried to put it in the fire. I couldn’t, it’s caught fire. It caught me on fire. You do it. Just please do this for me. And he’s like holding it. And he’s like thinking about it. You can see him thinking about it. And then the rational side of him is no, this isn’t healthy.
It’s not helping you. He gives her back.
Stephen: And then she throws Another fantastic performance by Toni Collette here. She’s just draws you into that scene. You can’t blink.
Rhys: [01:11:00] Yeah. She throws the book in the fire. He bursts into flames. A little unexpected, but okay. Yeah. Because he’s already tied to it by touching it and holding it for so long.
And then all of a sudden her face changes. Yes, exactly. Annie is no more. It’s complete. You can see when the demon takes over. Peter wakes up in pain at home in his bed in the dark. There’s a red light in the tree house, but it’s flickering. It’s not a space heater. There’s some sort of flame out there.
He doesn’t seem to put too much on that. There’s footstep sounds and the motion light turns on outside. He turns his head as something scurries across the wall behind him. About man sized. Yeah. Yes. Soft focus. You can’t tell what it is. He moves through the house. There’s flies everywhere. There’s big banging noises.
There’s tongue clicking going on. It’s a very horrific kind of situation. [01:12:00] And there are these slow pans and shots then he sees Steve on the floor, all burnt up, and then he sees, then Annie is in the rafters, there’s a figure in a dark open door, and then he sees Annie, and he takes off, and she’s chasing him, and he climbs into the attic of all freakin places.
Stephen: Yeah,
Rhys: whatever, but he’s a good escape artist. Pulls the ladder up behind him. She’s beating on the door with her head as she’s clinging to the ceiling.
Stephen: Very disturbing there too. And he’s mom, please. No mom. And you notice he reverts. He starts calling her mommy, which any self respecting high school student is not going to do.
Rhys: Yeah. The body isn’t there anymore. There’s a silhouette of the decapitated body in sawdust and a photograph of him with his eyes scratched out. And he thinks he’s dreaming, he starts slapping himself to wake up, and there’s this noise of a fleshy squish above him, and Annie is levitating, cutting through her own neck with a [01:13:00] wire, and that reminded me of Audition 2.
Stephen: And so did the eyes, cause with his picture, I thought the same thing there.
Rhys: Yeah, she’s beheading herself. There are three naked people up in the attic with him? So he just jumps out the window. I don’t know. And I love it. Yeah, I love it. Cause there’s a shot of him lying in the flowers and then you hear the sawing stop and the sound of a head hitting the floor.
Yeah. Yeah. Then he looks up and sees his mother’s headless corpse float across the driveway. And up into the tree house and it’s wow, if you wondered if this was supernatural or not
Stephen: like a relic or something where like suddenly it gets really weird and supernatural.
Rhys: Yes. And the spirit of Charlie has inhabited him as well, because now he clicks just like her.
Yeah, he walks over and he climbs up the ladder, the dog. Is lying in the grass, dead, of course, horror [01:14:00] movie. The music is now no longer spooky. It’s like triumphant. Harold the King. Yeah. He climbs up and there’s naked people all around. There’s naked people in the trees standing behind. People are prostrated inside as he comes into the tree house and the bells start ringing and he turns his head to see a statue before him with his mother’s skinned face on the statue.
And his grandmother and mo mother’s bodies are both kneeling prostrate before it without heads. But he’s really not Charlie anymore. He’s looking at it and he’s got this puzzled look on his face and Joan is in attendance and he sees this photograph of his grandmother and then Joan puts a crown on him and he doesn’t even react.
And she calls him Charlie and tells him that he is payment. One of the eight Kings of hell. We have corrected your female body and given you this new male host. And then she says, we reject the Trinity and [01:15:00] pray devoutly to you. Great pavement, give us your knowledge of all secret things. The crowd hails payment and the camera pulls back and it looks just like one of his mother’s models and then roll credits.
And they’re playing both sides now, which is a Joni Mitchell song, but this is a, More upbeat version performed by Judy Collins. And that is heredity.
Stephen: Yeah. And even pushing it, it still takes a bit to talk about his movies. It takes a while to go through and discuss. Oh yeah. And the
Rhys: fan theory is that Annie knew about this the entire time.
Because she sees the words written on the wall, she ignores them. She sees the triangle burnt into the floor. She ignores it. So she actually was actively participating in making this happen on some level.
Stephen: Which could have been what drove her to her psychic [01:16:00] snaps and mental problems that war between the two sides.
Yeah.
Rhys: Yeah.
Stephen: All right. There we go. Ari Aster does it once again. Yeah, he does an awesome film. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome in a very disturbing way.
Rhys: Yes. Yes. Yeah. It’s a really rough film, but.
Stephen: Yeah, not for everybody, but yeah, very well done. All right. So what’s number two
Rhys: on
Stephen: our hit
Rhys: parade?
We’re going to go back to Corin Handy, who did the hallow and he directed a movie called the nun, which you might’ve heard of.
Stephen: Ah, yeah. And they just came out with none too recently. So interesting timing. All right. So there’s Ari Aster and next coming up the nun. Awesome. Thanks Reese. Bye.
