Do we like Ari Aster?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and nothing against him on how he treats people, but there's little on record about good he's done off-screen.
Ari Aster is the director behind Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid and Eddington, all made with A24, which has backed his last four films. He's made his name on grief, dread and families coming apart, and the Provincetown festival named him its 2025 Filmmaker on the Edge honoree. He also writes his own scripts, so what ends up on screen is very much his.
The nearest thing to a stoush in his career is Eddington, his 2025 pandemic-era Western, which split critics after its Cannes debut. Justin Chang of The New Yorker argued its even-handedness is a pose that mostly targets mask-wearers, young progressives and anti-racists, while Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that if Aster thinks he's saying something about America, “the joke is on him.” Aster rejects the idea that it's harder on the left than the right, calling that view “pretty disingenuous.”
On the harm test, we found nothing of his own that targets LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or public health, and no climate-denial or conspiracy-peddling either. In interviews he calls Eddington “omni-political”, says he tried to give many viewpoints weight, and argues talking across divides is the only way forward. In one he says “I'm not a politician, I'm a filmmaker.” Where you land on Eddington depends on whether you read it as sharp satire of everyone or as a shrug at real harms.
The recent thing is Scapegoat, written by Aster, backed by A24 and produced by Lars Knudsen's Square Peg. Johansson is confirmed as the lead, and the cast has since grown to include Jacob Elordi, Jude Law, Ella Purnell, Caleb Landry Jones and Cory Michael Smith. The plot is under wraps; one outlet reports, citing Nexus Point News, a surgeon and an influencer who dies, with characters inspired by real people. Treat that as unconfirmed, since Aster hasn't commented.
On the company he keeps, there's no red flag. His recent collaborators are mainstream actors and A24, and nothing we found ties him to anyone pushing harm. Worth saying plainly: we found no court cases, no accusations and nothing about mistreating cast or crew, but also not much on charity or causes. That's honestly the whole list, so the good-stuff side is mostly his festival honour and his work.
So: would we support him? Yes. He passes both tests on what we could find. The caveat is that a thin record cuts both ways, and with Scapegoat built on real-life figures, it's one to watch when it lands, hopefully in 2027.