Every Ari Aster Movie, In Order
A good way to sum up Ari Aster’s significance over the last decade of cinema culture is to consider that A24 might not even exist without him — certainly not the Dior-collaborating, candle-producing, cultural taste-maker we know it as today.
By 2018, the studio had already made its name as a major indie player thanks to a bunch of widely celebrated movies — like Under the Skin, Lady Bird, Moonlight, and Good Time — but it wasn’t until Hereditary’s huge success that A24 became a ubiquitous brand and a major player at the box-office, helping to usher in an entire era of “elevated” horror in the process.
While a prolific producer of adventurous movies and TV shows — like The Drama and Primetime (both starring Robert Pattinson) and the Nathan Fielder/Emma Stone/Benny Safdie project The Curse — Aster has only written and directed three other movies since Hereditary, but each one has been utterly singular and more crazy than the last.
As we wait to hear more on his upcoming film Scapegoat (in which Scarlett Johansson is rumoured to be playing a surgeon who accidentally kills a patient), take this opportunity to dig into Aster’s incredible filmography with our in depth streaming guide.
Hereditary is Ari Aster’s feature debut, and as first films go it's as influential as they come. It's also still the scariest thing he’s made and up there with scariest horror movies of the last decade or so — and given the genre’s resurgence in that time, that’s saying something.
The plot, if you’re feeling brave enough to watch it, follows Toni Collette’s Annie Graham, an artist who goes through the usual motions of grieving process (with a little bit of demonic possession thrown on top) after her daughter dies in a grizzly car accident.
For anyone watching it at the time, that unforgettable scene made you sit up and take notice, as did a few in the final act involving weirdly positioned limbs and darkened corners. The movie’s $90m box-office takings might look modest compared to a movie like Obsession, but would Curry Barker even have become a director if Aster hadn't paved the way? It's worth considering, and either way this movie is a total blast.
From dark corners to endless daytime, Aster followed up his genre-rattling debut by making a horror movie that managed to be scary even though the entire thing takes place in gorgeous, Nordic sunlight.
Boasting a star-making turn from Florence Pugh at its centre, Midsommar follows a group of friends as they visit a remote village in Sweden to observe the pagan festival from which the film takes its name. Naturally, bad things start to happen.
Conceptually, Midsommar is still one of a kind: by setting his story in a place where the sun never went down, Aster invited you to examine things going on in the distant background, creating a sense of consistent unease and uncanny terror in the process.
It also confirmed that Aster was no one trick pony — the fact that it is still regularly memed and still inspires endless Halloween costumes says all you need to know about its cultural impact.
Having tapped into our anxiety centres with his first two movies, Aster delivered what felt like a three-hour-long panic attack with Beau is Afraid, his most ambitious and uneven movie to date.
For Aster, it's his most personal film as well; a genuinely challenging piece of work in which he pretty much bares his soul and explores the darkest corners of his mind — giant monster penises very much withstanding.
The plot follows Joaquin Phoenix’s browbeaten protagonist as he tries, and variably fails, to make it home for his mother’s funeral — by the time he actually gets there, things have fully gone off the rails, but the first half contains some of the most incredible sequences in Aster's career: the opening shot in particular might be the best expression of the doom-scroll that you'll ever see.
Still, for anyone doing a watch through, this one is probably best left for last.
In 2025, Aster made it two-for-two with Joaquin Phoenix with the release of Eddington, a biting satire of Covid-era anxieties that either proved too close to the bone or too provocative for many critics and viewers at the time.
The main reason for this was Eddington’s proximity to the very real and very recent summer of 2020, when Coronavirus ravaged our lives and our sense of time, bringing the world to a halt just as the BLM movement was properly kicking off. The movie centres on the eponymous New Mexico town, where a Covid-sceptical sheriff (Phoenix) begins a feud with the town’s charismatic mayor (Pedro Pascal). As you may have guessed, it doesn’t end well for either of them.
Reclaiming movies before they’ve had some time to breathe can be tiresome, but you really do sense that this film’s reputation will only grow with each passing year.
Naturally, the synopsis and setting of Aster’s next project is still being kept under lock and key, but we can at least confirm that it’s currently titled Scapegoat and will star the great Scarlett Johansson — with the former Black Widow joining Emma Stone, Florence Pugh, and Toni Colette in Aster’s growing pantheon of off-kilter heroines.
Johansson will presumably be joined by another of Aster’s sprawling supporting casts, which so far includes both Jude Law and Jacob Elordi. It would be unwise to speculate too much at this point, but word on the street seems to be suggesting that Johansson will play a surgeon who accidentally kills an internet star (played by Elordi and based on Jake Paul), whose widow and brother (based on Erika Kirk and Logan Paul) then come after her.
If this is true, Scapegoat will be toying with more recent events than even those in Eddington. Whatever the case, we'll be first in line.
