Ari Aster directed two films back to back that share a single obsession: grief as a supernatural force. Hereditary (2018) traps its mourning inside a dark house and watches it curdle into something demonic. Midsommar (2019) takes its grieving protagonist to a Swedish midsummer festival and burns her clean in broad daylight. Both films are about people who cannot survive their loss intact. What's different is what that loss turns them into, and what Aster thinks horror is actually for.
The architecture of grief
In Hereditary, grief works like a building collapsing floor by floor. Annie Graham loses her mother before the film begins, then loses her daughter Charlie in the second act, and the film treats both losses as part of the same structure. The house shrinks around the family. Every room becomes a place where something terrible happened or is about to happen. Aster uses miniatures throughout: Annie's diorama models of the family's trauma, small enough to hold in your hands, too precise to look away from. Grief, the film says, is an inheritance. You don't choose it. It arrives with the furniture.
Dani Ardor in Midsommar has a different problem. Her grief is acute and total: her sister kills herself and their parents in the film's opening minutes. That grief doesn't build. It detonates. And then Aster sends Dani to Sweden with a boyfriend who has already emotionally abandoned her, into a commune that offers something Annie Graham never gets: a ritual container for suffering, and an audience for it. The Hårga cry with Dani when she cries. No one in the Graham household can do that for each other.
Light versus dark as a structural choice
Both films are visually deliberate in a way that's worth naming precisely. Hereditary is shadow-and-ceiling horror. Aster keeps the camera low, holds on doorways and upper corners of rooms, places figures in the dark edges of the frame. The technique makes the house feel watched. It's the grammar of the haunted-house film, used here not for cheap scares but to build a sustained sensation of malign attention. Something in this house wants the family. Something has always wanted them.
Midsommar refuses that grammar entirely. Almost the whole film is set outdoors, in daylight that never dims because Hälsingland in midsummer doesn't let the sun go down. The horror has nowhere to hide. Aster is making a point: the Hårga's violence is communal, traditional, openly practiced. Nobody is hiding it. The films share dread but not darkness. Hereditary is a film you watch with the lights on because you're already too scared. Midsommar is a film you watch with the lights off and still feel exposed.
The cult as a solution
This is where the two films part most sharply. In Hereditary, the cult surrounding the Graham family is predatory. The demon Paimon needs a host. Annie's mother has arranged the entire family's destruction to provide one. The rituals the family gets drawn into aren't therapeutic or communal. They're extraction. The Grahams are raw material.
The Hårga in Midsommar are also manipulative. They select visitors. They arrange pairings. They engineer situations to extract what they need. But they also give Dani something real. Her grief is witnessed. Her relationship with Christian is ended for her when she can't end it herself. She wins the May Queen competition on her own terms, and the final image of her, smiling through tears as the temple burns, is genuinely ambiguous. Is she finally free, or has she simply traded one captivity for another with better catering? Aster doesn't decide. He leaves the question in her face and lets you sit with it.
Toni Collette and Florence Pugh: two different kinds of unravelling
Neither film would land without its central performance. Toni Collette in Hereditary operates at a frequency that feels physically unsafe. Her dinner table outburst at Peter is one of the most uncomfortable scenes in recent horror: not because it's supernatural, but because it's entirely recognisable. This is what grief looks like when it runs out of targets and turns on the people left. Collette plays Annie as a woman who knows she is dangerous to her family and cannot stop being dangerous to them.
Florence Pugh in Midsommar does something different and arguably harder. Dani is passive for most of the film, carried along by a relationship she's too scared to leave and a situation she doesn't understand. Pugh has to make that passivity feel active, has to make you understand that Dani's stillness is the stillness of someone waiting to find out who they are. The crying scene in the Hårga longhouse, where the women around her mirror her grief sound by sound, is the emotional centre of the film. Pugh performs full collapse without losing the character's dignity.
What Aster is actually arguing
Taken together, the two films form an argument about community and isolation. The Grahams are isolated by trauma. They can't speak to each other. They're picked off one by one because there's no shared ritual, no structure for grief, nothing to do with the feelings except have them alone in separate rooms. The Hårga are the opposite: so densely communal they've erased the individual entirely. Aster isn't endorsing either option. He's showing both extremes and noting that neither is survivable in the way the word "survive" normally means.
Horror has always been good at this kind of negative diagnosis. It can show you what destroys people without prescribing a cure. Aster uses grief because grief is the purest version of the problem: a feeling that demands community but often gets solitude, that needs ritual but rarely has one, that transforms the self in ways the self can't control. Both films end with the protagonist's identity fully remade by forces outside their consent. Whether that remaking is tragedy or something stranger depends entirely on which film you're watching, and who you were before you sat down.
Hereditary keeps the dread internal and ancestral. Midsommar externalises it, floods it with sunlight, and makes it communal. Together they're the most sustained examination of grief in 21st-century horror cinema, and neither one lets you off the hook.