"the story is so convoluted"

Yes, absolutely.

I haven't read the critics on this yet, so I'm not sure why they like it so much. At a guess, they are seeing echoes of other top filmmakers. But for me, this is nowhere near as eerily controlled as Kubrick's "the Shining;" this is nowhere near as psychological as Polanski's "Repulsion;" this is nowhere near the steady steadfastly mounting horror of John Carpenter's "Halloween;" this has nowhere near as the fascination and disgust for the underbelly as David Lynch (despite the ants lol).

On the positive side, this is nowhere near as audience unfriendly as Darren Aronofsky's "Mother" which faked that it was horror, was actually a disguised Bible story.

It is not just that the story is convoluted, which it is, it is that the movie never gets us to care about any character. Is this the story of a mother grieving her mother? Or a son traumatized for other reasons? It starts as the former, becomes the latter, then goes any which way, until the audience feel thoroughly dicked around, and not in a good way.

All the filmmakers I mentioned above would have exerted a more complete and all-consuming directorial control over the material, in my view.

Ari Aster tells us in the first shot what his game is: he is Mr Metaphor. We look out the window at a tree-house, which is the focus of our attention, only to turn around to discover the real house is a literal dollhouse (cos there is a real person sleeping inside an itty bitty doll house inside the actual house). And the whole shebang seems sustained to treat the characters as dolls from scene to scene.

While it is a clever enough metaphor that people can be dolls, manipulated in their fate, it's also pretty one-note, and it's so forcefed to the audience, that we lose our bearings about who to care about. Toni Collette's mother seems sympathetic until she's too freaky; her daughter the same, her mother the same, her husband too passive, and her son, well the infantilized way he calls her "mommy" and constantly cries and freaks out, squanders his potential to be our "in" to the story also.

We just don't know who to watch, or what to care about, and the filmmaker's constant doll metaphor suggests we probably shoudn't bother anyway.

Weirdly, the stuff I liked best was the freaky Japanese horror style sudden movements behind characters, as well as Toni Collette's and the whole cast's empathetic performances.

Putting all this aside, there is one standout sequence in the movie, involving the son driving a car, in which the filmmaker thoroughly succeeds in putting over his ideas about dolls and fate, and the reason it works so well is the completely credible sequence of events that gets us there, from teen parties, and unwanted tagalongs, and bongs, and girls, and it's just so well done, the way one thing leads to another. The culmination in a close-up of the son's face is a tour de force. This is Stephen King type thematic goal scoring, in it's evocation of the threat and malevolence lurking behind ordinary people and events. A total winner of a scene that saves the movie. :)