Hereditary Review

Before I begin, I want to assure my dedicated readers that the fact that I’m posting a review of a movie about a paranormally gifted slash Satan-worshipping matriarch on my mom’s birthday is sheer coincidence.  While the irony is far from lost on me, I can assure you all that my mom has never participated in any Pagan rituals – at least not to my knowledge.  Happy Birthday, Mom!  And now – on with the review.

A happy and well-adjusted family if ever there was one.  Just look at those smiles!

This past week, I went to see Hereditary, the harrowing horror film of the summer that’s already being universally lauded and described by many as the scariest movie of the year (take that, John Krasinski).  As someone who’s watched his share of horror movies and has in fact been scared by most of them (see my IT review), the bar for Hereditary to succeed was set pretty low in my case, and it was a bar that the film leaped over with relative ease, albeit in a way that I wasn’t anticipating.

Alex Wolff’s “possessed by a demon” face is also my “look at how good I look in the mirror” face.

What I really mean with that last sentence is that Hereditary isn’t about jump scares, and in fact you’d be surprised to find more than a couple of those throughout the film’s 127 minutes.  What it is seemingly about is being consistently unsettling, using spooky visuals, uncomfortable situations (usually social), stares that last just a bit too long, and an extremely tense family dynamic to keep the muscles of the audience clenched throughout.  It’s a very hard movie to relax during, as you can imagine any good horror movie would be, and it’s easily one of the most suspenseful and scary films I’ve seen in years.  Drawing comparisons, at least with recent horror films, is borderline useless in my opinion, but I’ll try anyways – it’s a completely different experience than A Quiet Place (admittedly a very unique film in its own right, and one that I also praised here), and it’s not really as visceral as IT.  It simply builds suspense and creates scary moments and setpieces in a different way than I’m used to seeing, and it’s super effective; I can really only think of a handful of movies (the original Halloween, Paranormal Activity, The Conjuring) that scared me more, with those experiences themselves, especially the first two, also likely a function of my age.

The seance scene: a staple of any paranormal thriller worth its salt.

A lot of Hereditary‘s power comes from suspense rather than overt scares, with many of the film’s thrills relying heavily on what I’d describe as torturous anticipation.  The dream sequence, one of the stronger sequences in the film if you ask me, was drenched in this.  A lot of the “payoffs” at the ends of these slow-building motifs are moments you’ve probably already seen in a single viewing of the trailer, but what allows them to still be scary is the time you’ve spent waiting for them to happen – you know they’re coming, and you just want to get them over with, but Hereditary relentlessly refuses to free you from that wait.  Adding to the ominous vibe in a more cinematic sense is the delicate camera work, which does well in folding one of the central character’s professions – the crafting of miniatures – into transitional and establishment shots that blend the real-world with the minute in a way that’s at times seamless enough to raise chilling questions about how much willpower Hereditary‘s character’s really have, and how much they can even use that willpower to change their fate, if at all.

Never eat in bed, kids – if you leave any crumbs you’ll wake up looking like this.

As horror movie casts go, Hereditary‘s has to be considered among the upper crust.  Toni Collette (Little Miss Sunshine, About a Boy, The Sixth Sense) turns in an impressively convincing performance as Annie, a miniature artist who’s forced to cope with massive amounts of grief and loss throughout the film.  Collette plays the central character, and arguably the most pivotal one in that her role in the crazy supernatural shit (for lack of a better term) and her knowledge of what’s going on around her are under question pretty consistently.  Nearly as pivotal is Alex Wolff‘s character, Peter, Annie’s oldest son, who winds up being the subject of a significant portion of the haunting that Hereditary dishes out.  Rounding out the cast are Gabriel Byrne (The Usual Suspects) as Annie’s wildly understanding husband Steve, Ann Dowd as mysterious medium Joan, and newcomer Milly Shapiro as Charlie, Annie’s immensely creepy-looking and creepy-acting daughter, who also serves as the source of the tongue-clucking aural cue that becomes ubiquitous in both the trailer and the film.  Truly fantastic casting work is on display here, especially in Shapiro’s case.

I believe this production still comes to us from the scene in which Charlie is about to use a pair of scissors to cut the head off of a dead bird.  Eegh.

The single greatest point of merit for me, though, is Hereditary‘s plot, which is rooted in familiar paranormal elements but makes a number of choices to set itself apart from similar films.  Indeed, Hereditary accomplishes the rare feat in horror of stringing tense and scary beats together to create a satisfying and complex enough story to have audiences walking out of the theater asking questions about what they just saw.  It immediately begs for a second viewing in that regard, with little clues being dropped throughout (often in the background of shots) that do well in stringing the audience along, all the while imploring them to try to solve the puzzle being slowly laid out without giving nearly enough away to take away from the film’s climax/ending – an ending that admittedly goes a little off the rails and serves as what I think was Hereditary‘s single weakest point.  The only other knock I have is that Hereditary also has a bit of a pacing problem in the first act – until the inciting incident occurs, the film without a doubt moves pretty slow.  I’m of the opinion that this may in fact be an integral part of Hereditary‘s fear-building process, allowing the inciting incident to be that much more jarring, but the result of this tightrope act of slow pacing during Hereditary‘s expositional sequences may be the loss of the interest of some viewers.

Me when I go to someone’s house and they don’t have air conditioning.

With that said, Hereditary is doubtlessly as good as both the early reviews from Sundance and the current reviews claim, and in certain instances it may even be better.  It’s a strong debut for director Ari Aster, who may have a bright future in continuing to make films that nearly make me crap my pants.