Hereditary

photo courtesy of screamhorrormag.com

     Toni Collette stars in Hereditary, a horror movie about the skeletons buried in one family’s closet. Collette plays Annie Graham, whose family is recovering from the loss of their reclusive and unusual grandmother. As Annie copes with a mixture of grief and anger, she and her children begin to explore their grandmother’s mysterious past. The secrets they uncover threaten to swallow them alive.

     Hereditary is one of the best horror movies to come out in a while: it’s gripping, it’s chilling, and it’s smart. It’s also very possibly too slow for some viewers more interested in scares than story. For a more detailed (and more spoilery) discussion, keep reading after the jump.

BEWARE: HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

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     Slow-burn, character-driven horror films have been having a moment lately, the crowning achievement being the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay earned by last year’s hit, Get Out. Though the two movies don’t share much else on the surface, Hereditary belongs to the same basic school of thought: favoring long buildups and big payoffs over the jump-scare-driven tactics of, say, the Conjuring franchise. It’s an approach that, when done well, lends a profound kind of horror—an unsettling, disquieting, lasting horror—that all the CGI demons in the world can’t match.

     Hereditary isn’t without jump scares; it does the whole “oh-god-what’s-that-thing-on-the-ceiling” routine with the best of them. But it builds its most effective scares with claustrophobia and paranoia, which makes it all the worse when something finally does run out of that shadow in the corner. The primary influence appears to be the classic horror film Rosemary’s Baby (1968), which sees Mia Farrow’s Rosemary slowly encircled by a conspiracy of mal-intentioned devil-worshippers. Also in play are more modern influences like The Skeleton Key (driving the victim into a pre-prepared attic), The Babadook (evil forces as a metaphor for grief; family members turned against each other), or The Witch (old-timey, honest-to-goodness witchcraft).

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     There are several striking scenes worth mentioning. Annie and Peter (Alex Wolff) looking at each other covered in paint thinner, Annie’s recently deceased mother appearing in the corner of her workshop, Peter feeling the first effects of his possession in the classroom—all of these are standout spooky moments. The most genuinely horrific moment, of course, is Charlie’s accidental beheading and the immediate aftermath. But as impressive as these moments are, it’s still not hard to see how a casual viewer would be turned off by Hereditary; apart from being slow in moments, it can also be decidedly weird and more than a little confusing. Treehouse shrine coronation, anyone?

photo courtesy of npr.com

     If, however, you can stick around, there’s quite a bit of substance to Hereditary—even in the slow moments. It’s arguably stronger in those moments, where it examines the impact of tragedy and mistrust in a family, than in its scary sequences, where it becomes comparatively more derivative. Scenes like the one around the dinner table, in which Annie and Peter move from tense silence into argument and attack, have remarkable force and feeling. This kind of power is partly due to a dynamite performance from Toni Collette in the lead role, but it’s also a testament to the strength of the screenplay written by the director, Ari Aster. Aster taps into something primal about the relationships between family members, and that perceptiveness lends Hereditary an artistic edge.

TRAILER

Watch the trailer here.

photo courtesy of hollywoodreporter.com