There’s a new kid on the horror block aiming to take up space in your homes and your mind called Hereditary. The film directed by Ari Aster, about a family in grief, is a tense picture, but one I found ultimately unfulfilling.
Director Ari Aster is certainly a master of mood and dread and it is definitely one of the most confident horror movies you will see. Aster has such a command of the frame and how his actors exist within it that this is a rare horror film that doesn’t have many jump scares. Don’t take this to mean you won’t jump at something scary (the visuals here are WILD) but the movie is not built around those moments that make you leave your seat. And that’s the right approach to take because it allows the actors to shine. One of the best things about horror movies is that they really allow us to dig into primal human instincts in the way other films can’t. By putting the ordinary up against the extraordinary, humanity’s core essence can be revealed, and it’s revealed here by some great actors, led by the incomparable Toni Collette and the shockingly great Alex Wolff. Collette is no stranger to delivering great performances in horror films having been nominated for The Sixth Sense. She adds to her legend with a really ground, yet incredibly hysterical performance. She is going for it in every scene but still finds the core emotions of her character. Wolff, whom I didn’t like in Jumanji 2, is brilliant here as the son wracked with guilt and terror about his mother and what he’s done. He easily could have made this character unsympathetic but instead reminds us that even though he’s in high school, he’s still a traumatized kid.
So how come after leaving this movie the question is not how did they accomplish that, but rather what exactly is the movie confident about? This is a question I’m still wrestling with given the sheer amount of concepts and themes the movie broaches. To be honest, I feel this was a case of a movie setting up expectations and not necessarily sticking the landing it appeared to be. Hereditary doesn’t give a fuck about your expectations (probably why it got that D+ CinemaScore) but it should have cared more about the substance it was digging into. This movie covers everything from grief to mental illness to cults and demons in a way that seems to go against itself at times. This movie is definitely a slow burn, but did it really build up to that ending? And why did it feel like it took us forever to get there?
Hereditary is like the more volatile soul sibling of The Witch and The Babbadook. Those movies dealt with many of the topics broached in Hereditary but had a much clearer focus and drive. Hereditary starts with the death of a grandmother and by the 30-40 minute mark levels us with another death, that of the daughter Charly, in a horrific accident caused by the son Peter. In between however, it introduces, via Annie’s moving monologue in a grief support group, underlying familial issues with mental illness. It’s a really interesting set of layers to build on for a film, and for the most part it’s exactly where I thought the movie was going. I loved pontificating well into the run time of the film whether or not we were just watching a family come apart from the seams via hereditary mental illness. Toni and Alex do a complicated dance regarding these topics akin to the high wire work of Essie Davis in The Babbadook. The end of the 2nd act and beginning of the 3rd are some of the best parts of a movie I’ve experienced in a long time.
However, by the end of the movie Hereditary has decided to move in a different direction, raising a demon to possess the body of Peter. It’s a shocking move, but unlike The Witch, which had a similar shock turn, doesn’t feel as gratifying. Why is that? All the clues of the cult and the demons were laid out in Hereditary but Aster cannot make them come together because they feel so out of place. It’s like he traded a hard to read movie and replaced it with a movie about a topic that he intentionally obfuscates until the last 15 minutes. The conclusion isn’t even gratifying on a storytelling level because it shifts the narrative to focus on the least interesting character (not the least interesting actor though). It’s kind of frustrating really because I believe the movie is well composed, it just can’t stick the landing.