Ari Aster

Four of his planets sit in water signs and not one sits in air, with three each in fire and earth. Water takes on whatever is nearest it and there is nothing in the chart that stands outside a situation to describe it calmly, which is worth noting in a director whose two named films are both about people with no way out of what is happening to them.

The Sun sits at twenty three degrees of Cancer, the sign that keeps everything it is given and takes all of it personally, with the Moon just over into Scorpio. Cancer holds and Scorpio conceals. Films built on inherited damage and on ritual that cannot be refused are the work of a director for whom nothing gets discarded, and Aster’s chart has the two signs that discard least sitting in the two most important positions.

Six planets of the ten stood retrograde at his birth, which is a clear majority facing backwards and is the headline fact here. Venus makes easy contact with Pluto two hundredths of a degree from the exact angle and the Sun with Jupiter at three hundredths, both as tight as the arithmetic puts a pair. Nothing forms a yod or a T-square, so none of it is braced: the aspects simply stand, which is its own kind of unease. For a director whose films withhold the explanation until the last possible moment, an unbraced chart full of backward motion is a fitting instrument.

Jupiter rejoined its birth degree in Pisces on 7 April 2022, at thirty five, running backwards as it had been at the beginning. Pisces dissolves a boundary instead of defending one, which is an awkward sign for the planet measuring how far a thing has gone and a fitting one for films whose whole method is the removal of a safe distance. Three circuits sit behind that date, and both of the films the record names were written and released inside the most recent of them, which is a very short run for a reputation that size.