by Chris Feil
Hereditary gives so much: a bold lead performance from Toni Collette, genuine skin-crawling scares, and a stream of ominously manicured imagery to obsess over on multiple viewings. And yet its mightiest power is how and when it withholds. Layers revealed in its central family mystery only yield more questions and terrifying unreconciled implications on its descent into madness. You think at first the film is keeping you at arm’s length, when really it is picking you up by the shoulders and placing you down precisely where it knows it will unnerve you most. Letting it get its sadistic claws on you is simply one of the year’s essential cinematic experiences.
The feature debut of writer/director Ari Aster, Hereditary is uncommonly patient in delivering on its horrific promises. The film is less of a slow burn than an enticing bear trap, meditatively luring the audience with all of its pieces before suddenly closing its jaws on us with furious velocity. But that’s the thing about nightmares: rarely do they announce their punishment immediately. Hereditary is as wise and calculating as a demon ready to pounce.
The film begins with the death of the family matriarch Ellen, at once its most unknowable element and a dominating presence throughout. The immediate blasé fallout suggests a family dynamic already somewhat on the edge: an embittered estrangement from her daughter Annie, a favored and isolated granddaughter Charlie, a burnout grandson Peter, and little room to be made for son-in-law Steve among the intergenerational tensions. But as Annie copes with her grief and lingering grudges, the family must suddenly reckon with an otherworldly force invading their home. To say much more would be disservice to a narrative designed to disarm you by taking you into the unexpected.
What Hereditary has in store for the audience is one long dark night of the soul. While it delivers a visceral, almost surreal ride, its effectiveness comes from how it adeptly examines a rotting suburban American state of mind. Aster has given us a horror film that is part Greek theatre, part treatise on the nuclear family unit, and genuine tragedy.
Plenty of comparisons to legendary all-timer horror films have already been made, and the hyperbole is excusable considering the nuance beneath the film’s implacable nature. But along with the horror highs are shades of Bergman and von Trier-ian emotional extremity, and the grim wit of Lanthimos - the formally brilliant quotient is high. The film is a peer to the best of recent intense dramas, rather profound in the way it details the way family pressures and expectations manifest into internalized traumas. And we are all too powerless to overcome, our futures written for us in blood. We are the haunted house.
Annie is a new calling card for Toni Collette, an inarguable and gobsmacking benchmark for the actress. Much can, will, and should be made of the heights she charges toward in operatic fashion, but Collette’s power is how rooted she is in a believable reality just as Hereditary becomes more and more outlandish. There are barely contained resentments, troublesome ambivalences about motherhood and mental health, and regretful affection all tied into one tidal wave of a performance. It’s not just the crazier elements that Collette is sinking her teeth into, it’s the humanity of Annie’s tragic unraveling as well.
Elsewhere, Annie’s children are played to unsettling effect by Alex Wolff as Peter and Milly Shapiro as Charlie. Wolff is maybe the film’s riskiest performance, purposefully histrionic and archetypal to kabuki extremes - think Shelley Duvall in The Shining as a reference point. Shapiro is both heartbreaking and disturbing, both the film’s one true innocent and its harbinger of doom. Byrne is the film’s only vacuum as the father, with too little to do even past the intention of this in the role. As great as ever, Ann Dowd is there, but one absolutely should not tell you why she is there.
The film remains as audacious as its key player Collette, giving a slew of nifty visual tricks and wild turns. And yet to call the film unhinged would be off-base considering the impressive control Aster maintains throughout, particularly when its family comes undone. In an era of impressive feature horror debuts, his is among the most formidable. Hereditary is a distinct vision, precise and direct as it broods over slippery human natures.
It’s a unique experience to be at once thoroughly fascinated and pinned to your seat in fear, and that is precisely why Hereditary is so special. What does Hereditary find the most terrifying? The inherent unknowability of those who are supposed to be closest to us, and what they have instilled in our bones. Rest assured, this won’t satisfy everyone’s taste for a frightening time at the movies. But damned if it isn’t one of the year’s very best films.
Grade: A-