Hereditary got a lot of press early on as one of the scariest, most intense films in a long time, and it's actually all true. This debut film from director Ari Aster is seriously something else, a brutal, hypnotic concoction of terror and grief.
Director: Ari Aster
Starring: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff
This isn't the spoiler part of this review, so I'll just say the way Aster put these scenes together, attaching such weight to every glimpse into the macabre, every bizarre gross-out scene, makes this a very different experience from others of its kind. The things he chooses to linger on are horrific and impactful, and the scares that come out of nowhere truly feel surprising. Even when it's doing things you expect from a horror movie, they just feel fresh and new again, done with this caliber of directing. There are some horrifying images here, some scenes that just hit you where you live. But I couldn't look away.
This was billed as a horror movie that's also a family drama, and there's a fair bit of that. The acting is very good. Toni Collette delivers an incredible performance, throwing everything she has into it, and Alex Wolff as the son, Peter, is just great. Even the father character, played by Gabriel Byrne, manages to be engaging despite being given comparably less to work with. There aren't very many other characters in this, as in many horror movies, and so it's hyper-focused on this family as they deal with the grief of losing first their grandmother and then the little sister, Charlie, in a gruesome accident. You've seen stories about dysfunctional families before, with secret resentments coming out, and so on, and this movie does what you expect, with perhaps more bile and fury than usual for a horror film's dramatic parts.
The quality of the acting, and the way the movie just keeps throwing stuff at you, gives this the weight of the world. It's in the way the movie shows you the darkness and then just holds your head down in it. Most horror movies like this would usually have treated the darkness like a quick gimmick or a joke, just quickly flashing something scary and then cutting away, often playing with expectations by showing that the eerie jump scare was just, like, a cat moving too fast. But Hereditary dwells in darkness and stays there. It's in the magnitude of it.
The quality of the acting, and the way the movie just keeps throwing stuff at you, gives this the weight of the world. It's in the way the movie shows you the darkness and then just holds your head down in it. Most horror movies like this would usually have treated the darkness like a quick gimmick or a joke, just quickly flashing something scary and then cutting away, often playing with expectations by showing that the eerie jump scare was just, like, a cat moving too fast. But Hereditary dwells in darkness and stays there. It's in the magnitude of it.
In the end, the story becomes a more conventional horror tale despite the claims in early reviews that this was something truly different. But it does add a lot of texture and nuance to the film and makes it more of a relatable, human experience. Horror is best when you care about the characters, and the levels of grief here make the movie a more whole experience than just another empty jump-scare fest. When traumatic things happen to Peter, the cries of Alex Wolff, the fear on his face, make it real and make it stick with you. A lot of horror films can't achieve this so well.
A lot of this would play almost like a fan-fiction pandering to horror fans, if it wasn't so well done. There were so many years when we got nothing but dime-a-dozen flicks, and it's why I made this blog in the first place, to lampoon those terrible films. To get something like this just has every single good thing about the genre, turned up to 11, from eerie supernatural whispers in the beginning to outright screaming Satanic horror and hellfire at its climax, feels like a reward for sitting through all of that dreck. From its drama you also get a bunch of really good scares, just over-served to you for two goddamned hours. It's too much, it's excessive, but man is it glorious. I couldn't get enough.
Okay. So I think that's enough with the non-spoiler part. I actually wanted to talk about some other stuff. SPOILERS from here on out!
What eventually unfolds is a kind of Rosemary's Baby-esque conspiracy involving cult members and a demon king, who Peter is revealed to be at the end, the entire movie basically being the build-up to his initiation and change into this hellish entity from mythology. It's been done before, though not always with this level of ominous atmosphere. But it had the intended effect, and was executed with proper intrigue and coiling suspense and confusion.
I think it's important that we're getting new stories like Rosemary's Baby. That film was of undeniable quality. But in this new era of #MeToo, I think a lot of people are really being hit with the full force of how little we actually need pieces of shit like Roman Polanski in the popular lexicon. Enjoying works by people like him now feels guilty and odd, and even if that isn't the case for you, there are so many other, new quality artists out there you could be partaking in instead. Hereditary offers a well-done take on the Rosemary's Baby formula, with similar quality of suspense and drama, a family being torn apart by grief carrying the same kind of weight as Rosemary's motherly anguish over her unborn child.
Another one is Karyn Kusama's “Her Only Living Son,” a short film, and part of the XX anthology that came out last year. That one was even closer to Rosemary's Baby, with a story about a mother losing control of her son as he wants to live with his “father,” who ends up being Satan.
Both of these are seriously good entries into the horror genre, and they serve as ways to almost "repurpose" the good things about Rosemary's Baby. It is a primarily symbolic thing. It would've been interesting if they hadn't done it this way, and instead gone all the way with a non-supernatural kind of story, relying solely on the decay of a family as a way to bolster horror. But it went with a traditional story and did that better than anybody has in decades. I'm not sure if anyone would really try something so conceptual like a whole horror movie just being a family drama. I hope someone does, but I haven't seen that kind of thing yet as of right now.
But it's great that we're getting some new blood infused into horror, which for so long has been a kind of archaic old boys' club where the classics are lionized and everything newer is looked at with the “not as good” skepticism, even though for years now we've been getting plenty of amazing entries that are easily as good as many classics. Some people will always have that kind of "nothing can ever top the classics" mentality. But for everyone else, Hereditary is the most recent new film that absolutely fucking nails what it wants to do.
But it's great that we're getting some new blood infused into horror, which for so long has been a kind of archaic old boys' club where the classics are lionized and everything newer is looked at with the “not as good” skepticism, even though for years now we've been getting plenty of amazing entries that are easily as good as many classics. Some people will always have that kind of "nothing can ever top the classics" mentality. But for everyone else, Hereditary is the most recent new film that absolutely fucking nails what it wants to do.
I walked out of the theater at 2:30 a.m. Saturday feeling like I'd just gone through a legit ordeal. I felt like there were dark, bizarre things in the world and like I had just come out of some parallel dimension. Those are whimsical and fantastical feelings, but if a piece of art isn't affecting you in some similar way, what really is the point?
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