I have delayed this review for over two weeks, and in that time, not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about Hereditary at least once. I really, really hesitate to say this, because if anything can derail Toni Collette’s Oscar traction and ruin this movie for audiences, it’s the hype train.
Hereditary is a name I’ve been hearing since last year’s Sundance coverage. Critics were tight-lipped about any details, but were quick to tell us that we should be keeping an eye out for this one. In general, this reaction indicates two things: A) I need to see this movie, badly, and B) There is either a twist or a complex plot point that Sundance-goers anticipate will be spoiled shamelessly by the upcoming trailer or movie poster. One of the joys of seeing a film at a premiere or an early screening is that you’re going into the experience without a Rotten Tomatoes score, an IMDB score, a Metacritic score, a Cinemascore, or even a general impression of the film’s quality. You aren’t yet the victim of months of heavy advertising from unwanted Youtube ads and click-bait banners, and you are absolutely free to experience a film outside of its hype context. When my Youtube subscription feed became populated with videos titled “HEREDITARY EXPLAINED!!!!!”, I decided the very next day to drop everything I was doing and just go see the film.
The day after seeing it, I noticed Hereditary everywhere. IMDB had a full-background ad for it, a film critic I follow mentioned it (in an unrelated video I might add), and that poster was all over nearly every site I visited. I felt that I made the correct decision.
So before you tune out because the rest of my review is going to be spoiler-heavy, here are a few things that might actually be useful to know about Hereditary before seeing it:
- Hereditary is the first feature-length film by Ari Aster. He directed at least two short films that received some generous critical acclaim, both of which involve odd Twilight Zone-esque scenarios. For those of you who know how overlooked the world of short-subject cinema is, this should speak volumes about the film’s quality.
- This film is not directed by, written by, produced by, or in any way associated with M. Night Shyamalan or any of his acolytes. Don’t sit through Hereditary expecting Toni Collette to have been dead the whole time.
- This is not a splatter-fest, and it has very little in common with The Exorcist. I know trailers and press releases like to throw around the age-old line, “It’s the scariest film since The Exorcist!” but not only is that a really stupid benchmark, it’s such an advertising cliché that it’s literally meaningless in 2018.
- Alex Wolff is in this film. Do not let this taint your perception of his performance, because it’s certainly not Disney-grade. He’s come a very long way since The Naked Brothers Band, and as far as I can tell, his career trajectory looks far more promising than that of your average Disney star.
- Hereditary is an A24 film, not a Blumhouse film. Examples of A24 films include: Lady Bird, The Disaster Artist, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, It Comes At Night, Moonlight, and The Witch. Examples of Blumhouse films include: Insidious, The Purge, Ouija, and Paranormal Activity.
By now, you have precisely enough information to judge for yourself whether Hereditary is going to be worth seeing with or without spoilers, so here they come.
You have been warned.
Hereditary begins with one of my favorite kinds of opening shots. We see a room with a dollhouse in it, and the camera slowly zooms toward a single room in the dollhouse, eventually becoming the setting for the opening scene in which a father attempts to wake up his son. It’s a shot that certainly isn’t original, but it’s used to great effect, and it will likely stick with me for a very long time.
The film is essentially a family drama. I know, that sounds like a pretty disappointing statement, especially with all the build-up to being “Exorcist scary.” Thankfully, very little if anything is disappointing about Hereditary, unless you went in with skewed expectations.
Most of the plot focuses on our four primary characters. The father, Steve, is both a skeptic of the paranormal events happening around the family, and the family’s last anchor to reality. Alex Wolff plays the son, Peter, who has a far more interesting role to play than we’re initially led to believe. Toni Collette plays the family’s mother, Annie, in a performance so nuanced and intense that the Academy better take notice, or there will be riots. She financially supports the family by creating very detailed miniatures and selling them. Charlie, the quiet, deformed daughter, is played by Milly Shapiro in her first big role, and given that she’s been front-and-center in most of the advertising for the film, this could either make her career or leave her unfairly typecast.
This family is a goddamn mess. Annie’s mother has just died, and her eulogy reveals that her relationship with her mother was strained because of issues related to what appears to have been mental illness. There’s a decent turnout at the funeral, something the family clearly wasn’t expecting due to the vitriolic nature of Annie’s mother. For a while, we’re led to believe that the passing of grandma is the primary reason for this family’s dysfunction, but it’s apparent that there are other tensions below the surface from the very beginning. The remainder of the film is like a nightmarish funeral that never ends.
In an attempt to seek help and closure over the complicated loss of her mother, Annie visits a grief support group. The group is conveniently held in the center of a darkly-lit gymnasium, the only real light source being directly above the group itself. When Annie finally decides to share her reason(s) for being there, she begins to vomit exposition all over the audience. Apparently, Annie’s brother killed himself because he was schizophrenic, and thought that his mother was “trying to put people inside of him.” I would normally have issue with this kind of backstory delivery, especially because of Toni Collette’s frantic verbal pacing, as if to get it all out of the way as soon as possible, but it’s a haunting scene that really highlights just how depressing and hopeless one feels while at a grief support group.
So, I know I just spent several paragraphs talking about how it’s best to go into Hereditary with as little information as possible, but I have to give credit where credit is due. A24 did a real bang-up job marketing this film, and while I still feel they revealed a bit too much in the trailer, they’ve manipulated the general public much in the same way that Hitchcock did with 1960’s Psycho. Creepy Charlie, who looks a bit similar to the “Little Witch” in 1973’s Don’t Look Now, is put front and center in most of the advertising, implying that she is likely either the main character, or the main villain. Either way, it certainly appears that she’s about to get plenty of screen time.
One evening, Peter is invited to a house party that will no doubt involve drugs and underage drinking. His mother picks up on this almost immediately when he asks to borrow the car, even though Peter lies by telling her it’s a school function. Annie forces Peter to bring Charlie along with him, and he reluctantly agrees.
At the party, Peter does everything he possibly can to ditch Charlie, who clearly isn’t thrilled to be there. When he finally convinces her to flee to the other room in search of cake that probably contains peanuts, which Charlie is highly allergic to, Peter is able to retreat upstairs to get high with his crush. After a rather brief period of time, Charlie finds Peter upstairs, and proclaims that she’s having difficulty breathing. Quickly putting two and two together, Peter carries Charlie to the car and rushes toward the hospital. In an effort to breath more easily, Charlie rolls down her window and sticks her head out. Peter, distracted by a dead animal in the road, veers a little too close to a telephone pole, and Charlie is decapitated.
Bear in mind, this happens a little over thirty minutes into the film, and it’s the reason this marketing gets a Hitchcock comparison. While Hitch fucked with our heads by killing off the top-billed star in the first third of Psycho, Hereditary takes our expectation that the film will be about a creepy child who commits murders, and subverts that by having her decapitated early on. It’s a shocking, chilling moment, and it’s painfully well-executed. Peter sits in his car, unable to look in the back seat, and we see his face shift through a wide variety of emotions before going completely numb with shock, driving home, and crawling into bed like nothing happened. I’d make comparisons to the novel that Psycho was based on, and how the main character was originally decapitated in the shower rather than stabbed, but the removal of heads becomes very important to Hereditary’s plot.
After being caught in the parking lot about to flee from her second visit to the support group, she is approached by a woman named Joan, who is apparently another member of the same group. Joan gives her address to Annie, and Annie drives away.
Throughout the entire second act of the film, Peter and Annie alternate between shockingly calm and utterly insane. We find out that Annie has, in the past, had a nasty habit of sleepwalking. On one occasion, she doused Charlie and Peter in paint thinner, and woke up just as she struck a match, intending to burn them both alive. Peter has never forgiven her for this, and Annie begins to tell him about all the times she wanted to abort the both of them or force a miscarriage. This essentially drives a permanent wedge between the two.
Annie finally decides that she may need a friend after all, and pays a visit to Joan, who is simply thrilled. Several days later, Annie runs into Joan at the parking lot of a crafts store, and Joan ecstatically proclaims that she has found a way to contact her own dead loved ones. She insists that Annie join her at her home, and when she does, Joan appears to perform a successful séance, summoning her dead grandchild. She instructs Annie to go home and read aloud a passage that Joan provides. When asked what language it is, or what the words mean, Joan just replies that she doesn’t know, but it seemed it work. When Annie tries the incantation, she makes contact with a spirit that she believes to be Charlie, who communicates through Charlie’s old sketchbook.
When Annie rushes to Joan’s place to relay the good news, the film instead decides that it’s plot revelation time. Joan isn’t at home, so Annie leaves, but not before the audience gets a glimpse inside of Joan’s apartment, in which we see a pentagram with Peter’s face in the center. Annie comes to the conclusion that Joan isn’t who she says she is based upon the welcome mat on her door, which looks suspiciously like the ones her mother used to make. When Annie arrives home, she glances through some of her mother’s old photo albums, only to find many pictures of her mother with Joan and other members of the cult the film has vaguely alluded to.
Meanwhile, Peter is at school getting high and trying to cope. As he eats his lunch alone at a picnic table, he sees Joan across the street. She begins chanting inaudibly, until we hear her say, “I cast you out, Peter!” When he returns to class, Peter involuntarily smashes his head against his desk, and his body begins to contort.
Annie finally reaches the point of sheer insanity. She attempts to burn Charlie’s sketchbook, realizing that the spirit she summoned earlier was not her daughter. When the book begins to burn, so does Annie, so she removes it fro the fire. When Steve arrives home from picking Peter up from school after his mishap, Annie reveals that her mother’s headless body is inexplicably in the attic, and then tries to convince Steve that the cult her mother was involved in has been manipulating the family. He doesn’t buy a word of this, believing Annie to be mentally disturbed, which is obviously true. In what she intends to be a self-sacrificial act, Annie begs Steve to throw Charlie’s sketchbook into the fire, letting her burn to death. When he refuses, she throws it in anyway, and Steve bursts into flames.
As Peter regains consciousness the next day, he discovers his father’s body and his now-possessed mother chases him to the attic, frantically banging her head against the attic door. When she finally makes it through, she levitates before Peter, and cuts her own head off. Peter is thrown from the attic window. Slowly, he rises from the ground, now possessed by the Lord of Hell, Paimon, whom his grandmother’s cult worships. He follows his mother’s headless corpse as she floats into the tree house, where he is greeted by several headless bodies and the followers of Paimon, as they express their elation with finding the perfect host body for their dark lord. Throughout, it is hinted at that Paimon prefers a male host, and as Joan approaches Peter and calls him, “Charlie”, we realize that his younger sister was Paimon incarnate, but because Charlie was deformed and female, the cult instead decided to groom Peter for his new role as host to the Lord of Hell.
Paimon be praised!
I’ve come across three primary criticisms of Hereditary. The first major criticism is the ending. It’s quite bleak, and it feels like it leaves us with quite a few unanswered questions. The more I think about the film, the more I realize that very few of the inexplicable happenings in Hereditary are actually inexplicable. It’s filled to the brim with metaphor, much of which is related to the miniatures the mother crafts. The dollhouse perspective represents the ways the cult and Paimon himself are manipulating the family, and the opening shot really drives that home, showing us that from the very beginning, these people have had little control over the film’s strange events. This explains so many of the potentially convenient plot points, and while that explanation might not satisfy everyone, it certainly satisfied me. I also thought The Witch had one of the greatest endings in the history of horror, so take that for what it’s worth.
I’m also rather annoyed with those who claim that Hereditary is boring, and far too long. It is certainly a slow film, but I don’t feel like two hours and seven minutes was too much to ask to hold anyone’s attention, especially in a film so densely metaphorical and hauntingly shot. The boring part is pretty subjective, but the slow pace allows the viewer to really feel the discomfort felt by the characters. It’s a truly soul-crushing movie to sit through, but it’s so masterfully crafted that I can’t say this is a fault. We’ve been releasing movies that intentionally make the audience feel uncomfortable since the inception of cinema, such as Schindler’s List, Requiem for a Dream, and A Clockwork Orange. In an age where mainstream horror relies almost exclusively on jump scares, Hereditary is a breath of fresh air.
The film has also been accused of being too derivative. While I definitely saw plenty of homage in the film, I was never too distracted by it. What really baffles me is that people seem to interpret derivative as predictable. When you look at the whole picture, the plot, and the way it unfolds, can you really say that you’ve seen this film before, and that it’s a boring predictable mess? Thinking back, I suppose there are a few conclusions I could have come to based upon references made. Charlie wears a red coat like the “Little Witch” and the child who drowns at the beginning of Don’t Look Now, so I could have reached the conclusion that she’d die immediately. Toni Collette’s performance is sometimes reminiscent of The Babadook, but that didn’t lead me to any plot revelations. Annie does the creepy wall-crawl thing that so many possession films do, but it’s treated subtly, and isn’t quite like other similar scenes.
We tend to talk about derivative film-making as if it were a new phenomena, especially in the realm of horror, and usually use this as a negative attribute rather than a neutral one. Realistically, homage ushered in the very eras we look back upon so fondly. The early Universal films had a profound impact on the Hammer era. Italy’s Giallo films, heavily influenced by the works of Hitchcock, contain almost all of the tropes we associate with 70s and 80s slasher flicks. The body horror of the 80s and 90s took inspiration from American sci-fi films from the 40s and 50s. These influences are interesting for sure, but their impact on quality is minimal. It all comes down to execution.
In spite of the many homages throughout, I felt that Hereditary was one of the most original horror films I’ve seen since The Witch, a movie I constantly refer to when people tell me that horror just isn’t as good as it used to be in those bygone golden years that *Plot Twist* never existed in the first place. Now, I have this film to call upon as well.
I often wonder which films we’ll look back on several years from now as classics, and which ones we’ll be embarrassed to have loved upon release. Given that some are already looking back on films like Insidious and Saw as modern genre classics, I get the impression that Hereditary will age well.
10/10
Seriously.