The Only Horror Film That Makes You Want to Call Your Mom and Your Therapist
Ari Aster’s Munchausen is the kind of short film that sneaks up on you like a homemade casserole laced with maternal anxiety and cyanide. It’s elegant, disturbing, and—because it’s Aster—just a little bit funny in the “I can’t believe I’m laughing at this” kind of way.
Before Hereditary gave us screaming Toni Collette and decapitated family bonding, Aster was already experimenting with the unholy fusion of love, guilt, and emotional violence. Munchausen is a silent, 17-minute masterpiece that proves sometimes the most horrifying thing in the world is an overbearing mom who just can’t let go.
And somehow, it’s beautiful.
The Setup: When Helicopter Parenting Becomes Homicide
Our story begins with a mother (the phenomenal Bonnie Bedelia) lovingly watching her son (Liam Aiken) prepare for college. It’s an ordinary suburban scene: boxes, nostalgia, the faint sound of your youth being murdered by adulthood.
But where most parents cry quietly into a box of tissues, this mother takes things to Olympic-level codependence. She daydreams about her son’s bright future—college success, debate trophies, a beautiful girlfriend, marriage, grandkids—the whole Norman Rockwell nightmare.
And then it hits her: all of this happiness will happen without her.
Cue the violins (which, in this silent film, you will absolutely hear in your head).
So what does our grieving matriarch do? She poisons him, of course. Because nothing says love like “you’ll never leave me if you can’t move.”
The Poisoning: Love, Actually (But With More Vomiting)
In a lesser filmmaker’s hands, this premise would play like a cheap Lifetime melodrama. But Aster has the subtlety of a surgeon and the sense of humor of someone who enjoys surgery scenes.
The mother stirs her son’s dinner with all the care of Julia Child preparing her final meal. The camera lingers on the food, on her face, on the suffocating domestic stillness. She feeds him Feel-Bad Sickness Prompter—a bottle that sounds like it was purchased from a 1950s snake oil salesman.
Her son eats it. Smiles. Compliments her cooking. Then spends the night writhing in agony while she hovers nearby, horrified by her own success.
It’s tragic, but also darkly funny. The labels on the poison and antidote look like they were designed by Tim Burton’s pharmacist. The situation feels like a twisted parody of every helicopter parent who ever hovered too close.
You can almost imagine the mother justifying it: “It’s only a little poison, dear—it builds character.”
The Silence: Screams You Can’t Hear Are Still Screams
One of the most striking choices Aster makes here is to tell the entire story without dialogue. The absence of speech amplifies everything—the longing glances, the quiet panic, the unbearable intimacy of codependence.
Without words, the story plays like a grim fairy tale or a twisted Norman Rockwell painting come to life. Each image feels hyperreal, drenched in color and dread.
Bedelia doesn’t need to speak; her expressions are their own horror score. One look from her, and you know exactly what’s running through her mind: “If I can’t have my son, then neither can adulthood.”
The silence also makes the humor land harder. Watching her quietly stir “Feel-Good Again Miracle Antidote” into soup feels absurdly quaint, like someone trying to fix a beheading with a band-aid.
The Death Scene: The World’s Saddest Mother-Son Bonding Moment
When her son’s condition worsens, the film shifts from subtle discomfort to full-blown nightmare. His body convulses violently while she clings to him, whispering comfort through tears we can’t hear. It’s gut-wrenching and grotesque—and somehow, still tinged with that signature Aster irony.
Because the mother isn’t a villain. She’s just… catastrophically maternal.
Her grief is real, her love is sincere, and her stupidity is profound. She’s every parent who ever said, “I just want what’s best for you,” and then proceeded to emotionally maim their child in pursuit of it.
When the boy finally dies in her arms, it’s not the scream that hurts—it’s the silence that follows. Aster doesn’t give us release. He gives us stillness.
And just when you think it can’t get any more tragic, the funeral scene hits.
The Funeral: Love’s Final Road Trip
The funeral plays like a grotesque mirror of her earlier fantasy. She once imagined chasing his car as he drove away to college; now she’s chasing his casket as it’s carried to the grave.
It’s the kind of symmetry that would make a poet weep—and a therapist open a new office.
Aster shoots it with both grandeur and absurdity. The mother’s grief is operatic, her desperation exaggerated, her tragedy self-inflicted. It’s Shakespeare by way of suburban psychosis.
And in that moment, you realize: the film isn’t mocking her. It’s mourning her. She’s not evil—just consumed by love so powerful it turned cannibalistic.
The Ending: Gardens Die Too
The final shot of Munchausen is pure, distilled Aster: the mother’s once-vibrant garden, now gray and lifeless, with her son’s childhood superhero toy resting forlornly in the dirt.
It’s a haunting image that says everything. Her love destroyed the very thing it wanted to preserve. The garden—symbol of growth, life, and nurture—is now a grave.
It’s the cinematic equivalent of overwatering a plant until it drowns.
You can almost hear Aster whispering: “See what happens when you love something too much?”
It’s bleak, yes—but there’s also a strange, macabre humor in it. The film closes not with rage, but with irony. Her final act of love has left her utterly alone, surrounded by dead flowers and sentimental garbage.
It’s Desperate Housewives meets Psycho, shot through with silent-era melodrama and a dash of cruel laughter.
The Performances: A Masterclass in Repression
Bonnie Bedelia’s performance is a miracle of restraint. She plays the mother not as a monster but as a woman driven mad by tenderness. Every twitch of her mouth feels like an emotional earthquake.
Liam Aiken is perfectly cast as the unsuspecting son—sweet, innocent, and utterly doomed. His scenes are so wholesome they practically beg for tragedy.
And because this is a silent film, the cast has to communicate everything with body language. Every glance, every gesture, every spoonful of poisoned soup is magnified to operatic proportions. It’s overacting done right—grand, expressive, and deeply unsettling.
The Themes: Love, Control, and the Horror of Letting Go
Aster’s genius lies in taking relatable emotions—grief, fear, love—and inflating them until they burst. Munchausen is essentially a parental anxiety dream. It asks: what happens when love becomes ownership?
The film’s dark humor comes from its honesty. Anyone who’s ever been smothered by affection will recognize this mother. She’s the voice that says, “Don’t go, you’ll get hurt!” and “Eat your soup, I made it just for you.” You just hope she didn’t literally mean that last one.
It’s both satire and tragedy—a fairy tale for the helicopter parenting age.
Final Verdict
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ — Five poisoned casseroles out of five.
Munchausen is short, silent, and devastatingly sharp—a perfect distillation of Ari Aster’s twisted compassion. It’s a love story without dialogue, a horror film without monsters, and a comedy where the punchline is your own emotional discomfort.
It’s proof that the scariest thing in the world isn’t death—it’s love that refuses to let you live.
So call your mom. Tell her you love her.
Just… maybe skip dinner.
