I know a lot of y'all out there reading this are very curious about Ari Aster's film Hereditary, which is being hailed as one of the scariest movies EVER and also totally bat-whack insane. So for those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll do a brief review without spoilers (although you really should go in completely blind) and for those who are too scared to see it (or want to be prepared), I'll write a much more detailed plot description below that.
Spoiler-free section:
I'll start out by saying that Hereditary is very, very good and incredibly distressing. There's already backlash against the film (which is Aster's first feature-length film, btw) saying it's over the top and even misogynist and ableist. By all means, read about the film and it's various interpretations, but this movie is pretty fucking well done in my opinion.
Hereditary opens on the day of Ellen Graham's funeral. Her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette, a force to be reckoned) gives an eulogy that reveals her not great relationship with her "difficult, secretive" mother. Later on in the film, we find out much more about this profoundly troubled mother-daughter relationship. Annie is a miniaturist who builds dollhouses and miniature replicas--very cool and also super creepy. She and her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne, appropriately understated) are raising two kids: older teen Peter (Alex Wolff, who steals the movie) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro), an odd, introverted thirteen year old girl with some tics and a propensity for drawing creepy ass cartoons.
Not long after the funeral, the family suffers another tragedy which I won't reveal the nature of, but I will say that it sets in motion all the wack shit you saw in the preview. At it's heart, Hereditary is movie about how grief can make us go insane and turn life into a waking nightmare.
The acting in Hereditary is top-notch, with Toni Collette giving a brutal performance as a woman who suppresses a lot of negative emotions and resentment until they explode and Alex Wolff giving a performance of intense vulnerability (when was the last time you saw an older teenage boy in a movie or TV show weeping and crying "Mommy!"? Some people in the audience giggled during those scenes because you don't see older boys cry a lot in movies and TV...because our culture is fucked up in how we limit the emotions of boys...but I digress. Wolff is excellent).
The scares in Hereditary are frightening, especially if you go in blind; however, it's the almost overwhelming emotions the film potentially brings out in the audience that is truly distressing. Let's just say that if you have a bad relationship with a parent, you might want to sit this one out.
Overall: excellent horror film that will leave you feeling emotionally shredded. Highly recommended.
Grade: A-
***
SPOILERS AHEAD
Let's just get the biggest spoiler out of the way first. Not long after Ellen Graham's funeral, Charlie, the thirteen year old, dies in a freak, super violent accident. Annie forces Peter to take her to a party and while he's getting high with some friends, Charlie eats cake with nuts in it and has an allergic reaction. As Peter rushes her to the hospital, she sticks her head out the window to get some air and is decapitated by a telephone pole. How you feel about this probably depends on a lot of things, like how dark your sense of humor is. But people in the audience I watched it with collectively gasped and then went dead silent.
In the days and weeks that follow, Annie and Peter are both overwhelmed by grief, guilt, and resentment. They have a confrontation at the dinner table in the film's best and most gutting scene where Annie says she wishes Peter would just admit that Charlie's death is his fault (since he wasn't watching her at the party) and he responds, "What about you, Mom? Charlie didn't want to go to the party. So why was she there?" Of course, they're both right--but they're also both wrong in the sense that it really is no one's "fault", which in a way makes the senseless death so much harder to process. It was just the worst possible thing to happen and it did happen and for no reason other than bad luck.
Annie and Peter start seeing things. Peter sees Charlie in the corner of his room. Annie has terrible dreams of Peter's face covered in ants. These could be the understandable bodily responses to grief, or they could be supernatural. But when Annie meets up with a woman named Joan from a grief support group (Ann Dowd, also known as Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid's Tale, and just as terrifying in this film) who claims she can talk to her dead son, shit really hits the fan.
After Annie forces Steve and Peter to participate in a seance ritual to contact Charlie, the supernatural events ramp up intensely: Peter's own body betrays him at school, and it seems that whatever is haunting the Graham family has it out for him in particular. Meanwhile, Anne discovers a secret that makes her blood run cold: Her mother *knew* Joan from the support group before she died (and Joan didn't mention it), and it appears they were in a devil-worshipping coven together.
Now, again, one's response to this information depends on the individual. I could see a lot of viewers finding the devil-worshipping aspect very cheesy, but I liked it. I'm also a huge fan of Rosemary's Baby, which was clearly an inspiration for this movie.
The final 20 minutes or so goes completely off the rails. It involves Steve spontaneously catching on fire (bye Steve! You were no help to anyone in this movie), Annie floating around the ceiling and eventually beheading herself, and Peter becoming the bodily host to a devil called Paimon and being worshiped by a bunch of old, naked people. Wooo, what a ride.
Suffice it to say, Hereditary is a roller coaster both emotionally and in terms of just the sheer amount of creepy and bizarre images. I mentioned Rosemary's Baby as clear inspiration for the film, but it's also very comparable to Darren Arronofsky's mother! in terms of bat-shittery. Like mother! Hereditary feels creepy and off-kilter from the get-go and ramps up to a wild, off-the-rails conclusion that will make some viewers roll their eyes and others feel a sense of delight, like one feels while riding a roller coaster or taking LSD or whatever people do to feel something EXTREME. Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of the movie and while it didn't scare me too badly in the moment (I read a detailed synopsis, much like the one I'm writing here, before seeing it), it did give me nightmares.
Highly recommended for lovers of horror and intense, bat-shit movies. Not recommended for people who have mommy issues.
Grade: A-
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