Hereditary, about a troubled family coming apart after a tragedy leads to an intrusion of the supernatural, is among the best, and rarest, kinds of scary movies, both a thoroughly observed examination of personal and human dynamics and diabolical descent into a place so creepy its power lingers long after it concludes. Hereditary stands as one of 2018’s best movies, but genre fans looking for closet-springing boogeymen should head elsewhere.
First-time writer and director Ari Aster has crafted what might be called a thinking man’s thriller, a slow-build movie that takes its time laying psychological groundwork that primes its characters for terror before breaking hell loose in an exceedingly spooky second half. In these stretches, even hardcore horror fans will find the air on arms and necks significantly raised. I sure did.
The picture’s opening shot of an obituary quickly moves to a family preparing for a funeral. Annie Graham (Toni Collette), a Pacific Northwest artist specializing in miniature rooms depicting intricate models of domesticity, is married to complacent, milquetoast Steve (Gabriel Byrne). The seemingly content pair also has a pair of children that seem to live in two different worlds.
The deceased here is the family matriarch and Annie’s mother, whose demonstrative demeanor and secretive disposition took its toll on everyone during her live-in twilight years. Annie initially feels guilt over not being more upset at her mother’s passing, and Aster’s screenplay develops a tortured mother-daughter past in truth-telling scenes where star Collette raises the picture’s emotional stakes and our investment.
The family also includes high school son Peter (Alex Wolff), an offbeat, somewhat geeky kid trying make time with the prettiest girl in class, and adolescent daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), one of those classic thriller kids operating from her own eccentric darkness. Strange features and even stranger behavior—she’s somewhat of a separatist from the family, sleeping in a treehouse—escalate after grandma’s death, when Charlie begins to experience a supernatural force.
This strong opener is followed by a shock that abruptly changes the film’s course. At Annie’s request, Peter takes Charlie to a raucous teenaged house party of pot, drinking and recklessness, resulting in a tragedy from which the family cannot recover. In their weakened state, the supernatural comes calling and boy, does it ever.
Ghosts seem to lurk everywhere—those of the past, those from beyond—and as the family becomes further siloed in their grief, Annie joins a support group, reluctantly confessing her mother’s devastating impact on her psyche and her family in a scene so filled with pain it achieves a sort of acuity rare in movies today, a transparency of emotion so naked as to remind us what the best of drama can accomplish.
Aster takes his time, trusting the viewer to hang tight until the picture’s surprises are revealed, and suffice to say that nothing is what it seems. Annie, of course, may be a carbon copy of her damaged mother—and knows it—and that possibility has her deeply shaken. And what is on the other side is waiting, and ready, to pounce. What this entity wants is another story, and Aster builds impressive tension. During Peter’s late-picture scenes in the classroom, where he is taunted by a demon, the director’s masterful manipulations of focus and sound design create an aria of fear.
Hereditary calls upon classic thrillers, including Rosemary’s Baby, which it can stand toe-to-toe with, and any number of pictures about a slide into insanity, notably Repulsion. It says that we are all haunted by our pasts, parents and decisions we’ve made, and those feelings manifest themselves in our own families. And that some things can never be forgiven. In addition to its affecting drama, there are classic thriller elements firmly in place, from seances to apparitions to grave robbing to Satanism to secret societies, and plenty of bumps in the night, even though some of them may come from your own mother.
Collette’s work here is so emotionally acute, and so wrenching, that both the meaty character and raw acting can stand with those in any recent Oscar-winning drama. In no less than a dozen or more scenes, she vividly depicts Annie’s guilt over her failures as a mother and the spoils that have happened in her family because of them, and her immobilizing grief matches the depths Ellen Burstyn plumbed as a similarly quagmired mother in The Exorcist, bewildered and with little comfort against a threatening world of the unknown.
The star’s angular, expressive face here suggests she has lived, and hard, and she uses every muscle to convey years of bitterness and dysfunction. She has a dinner table confrontation scene that lets go of a torrent of unfiltered feelings toward her son, another delivering an expression of deep sorrow and one near the picture’s end where she pleads with Byrne to help her course correct the source of the evil. Her work here may be her richest since her offbeat turn in Japanese Story fifteen years ago. This is major, top-of-the-line dramatic acting that gives Hereditary, a supremely scary and disturbing movie, its real weight.
4 stars.
