Hereditary is a 2018 horror/drama about a woman who starts witnessing strange occurrences following the death of her mother.
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Without giving away any major spoilers, I’ll try to describe the basic plot structure of this movie, since the ad spots I’ve been watching have wisely omitted any story discussion points and absolutely, your experience will be much better for it. There are some things here better left unsaid.
Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is a wife and mother who creates these miniature models of her time dealing with her eccentric mother before she passed away. After the death, her daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) starts acting in the same strange behavior that her grandmother did. It’s said that some particular characteristics often skip a generation. Maybe that’s what happened to Charlie, I don’t know. Not knowing how to deal with her loss, Annie enlists the help of a woman named Joan (Ann Dowd), who tells her of a way to communicate with the deceased. Her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and son Peter (Alex Wolff) are skeptical because she has done some unorthodox things in the past and just blamed it on her sleepwalking. So is Annie seeing things or is she going mad like her family?
It’s fascinating that writer director Ari Aster gives us these perspectives of each family member as they deal with Annie’s behavior. Sometimes, I believed her a hundred percent, and then I heard another story about what she did to one of the kids, and, well, I’m no longer sure. That’s clever. The movie does a great job of following the usual tropes you would find in other horror movies and then changing them up, though the only issue I had was during the last final moments of the movie, which I won’t spoil.
For the majority of the the running time, I’m watching Annie as she tries to get her family to believe in what she has been seeing. Even though there was a successful seance, it does little to no good in making her whole family agree. The kids, yes, but not so much her husband. Then, just when she is going to reveal something big, the movie makes this hard left, switching to what I feel is an entirely different direction, and I’m totally fine with this because it does have clues throughout that do help explain why it goes there at the end. For me, it was just a bit too abrupt and I would much rather have the reveal take more time to get where it wanted to go.
For my money, the Academy missed out big time in not nominating Essie Davis in The Babadook (2014). Let’s hope that they don’t miss out again with this performance from Colette, who does terrific work. You find yourself at times being both afraid for and of her character. There is a scene when both Annie and Peter are arguing at dinner that is just some of the best acting of 2018. Period.
It also boasts great production design (by Grace Yun), where the dollhouses that Annie are building are being incorporated into the real world the characters are living in. The Cinematography by Pawel Pogorelski (Tragedy Girls) has this slight look of a gritty late 70s horror feature mixed with that of a stage play. There are no quick cuts or fancy edits and I love it all the more for being so. This is Aster’s feature debut and I am very excited to see what he comes up with next. You should be, too. The man knows how to build tension but never forsakes character development just to get a cheap jump.
This leads me to the scare factor. Yes, there are going to be moments that will make you jump and even some that might highly disturb you. I don’t think this will be as iconic as The Exorcist or The Shining, but it is one that I still highly recommend. The Babadook deals with similar issues and that movie is slightly scarier, though this boasts better acting. There were plenty of screams in the audience I was sitting in.