with ole Two movies 2018 Hereditary and 2019 Midsmar, director Ari Aster, 36, has cemented himself as the master of creepy – but still unbearable – terrifying horror. with a third, the lover fears, Mathematically speaking, Aster has moved into a direction better defined as … In fact, it’s hard to tell.
Outwardly comic, the film follows a grumpy guy named Beau (Joaquin Phoenix) on a picaresque trip home to his mother. And if this looks like a fun evening in the pictures, well, no. like New York Magazine adequately explained, lover “Almost unbearably intimate, like falling straight into someone’s subconscious fully, a rolling boil.” It’s three hours you’ll likely never forget.
At the heart of the film is an extended, beautifully bizarre semi-animated sequence that goes a long way toward securing the film’s strangely flat effect. While watching a play set in the woods, Beau takes to the on-location scenery and then to fairy tale-like villages, living a long imagined life filled with pure love and abject horror. It’s subtle cinematic art presented as psychological weapons.
The sequence is the work of filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, who were brought in by Aster as animators after watching their 2018 film wolf house, a stop-motion horror film based on the real-life Colonia Dignidad (“Dignity Colony”) in Chile. Leone and Cucina worked from their studio in Santiago while Aster shot the film in Montreal and visual effects supervisor Jorge Cañada Escuriela put everything together in London.
On a video call from Santiago, Leon and Cocina explain that in the 18 months of their collaboration, the entire team has never been in the same room. “I just met Ari at the New York premiere,” Kosina says with a laugh. “I was pretty sure Ari wasn’t really that tall, which is true. But Jorge couldn’t, so I don’t know how tall Jorge is.”
Together with a team of about 20 artists, Leon and Kosinha use an amazing array of techniques to create the sequence images: green screen, hand-drawn backgrounds, life-size diorama sets, and rotoscope animation. “We wanted to create something you can’t figure out exactly how to make,” says Leon. “It’s very difficult to identify the drawn element or the animated element with stop motion. It was a huge laboratory to work with really talented people and combine technologies. A lucrative and fertile laboratory.”
Cociña adds, “In every scene, you have at least three techniques to interact. Every scene was a different battlefield.”
The most difficult element for Kosina was depicting the passage of time because it involved “changing seasons at a rate of about three seconds per season!” It was the biggest inspiration for the sequel The Wizard of OzBut nailing the classic movie “feeling of a very vast landscape,” Leone says, was always a challenge. Then Ari said, “I want Larger Space,” Kosina says with a laugh. “But it’s supposed to be a play!” In the end, Kosina admitted that Aster was right. “You’re in a distorted version of theater. You are in the fantasy. You are deep in my soul.”