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Hereditary (2018)
It is ironic that the supernatural horror genre needs to be grounded in realism in order to be frightening. The closer a film moves towards fantasy the less realistic and therefore less scary it becomes. Lauded by some as the horror film of the year, Hereditary (2018)struggles to balance realism and fantasy in an uneven film that will frighten only those who want to be frightened.
This is two films in one: an unsettling and tense portrait of a family psychologically traumatised by deep grief, followed by a bizarre journey into supernatural fantasy. We enter the film at the funeral of a matriarchal grandmother attended by daughter Annie and her husband, Steve (Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne), and their teenagers Peter and Charlie (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro). This is a family with a history of tragic deaths and Annie’s eulogy reflects a twisted relationship with the deceased. As a professional miniaturist, she mentally lives inside a dolls’ house world where she finds control over the chaos of her family life. While dealing with its recent bereavement, the family soon faces one more that is far more gruesome and bizarre. A cascading avalanche of weird happenings makes it increasingly impossible to separate what is real and what is psychotic hallucination.
The first half of the film has all the ingredients of a firmly grounded and brilliant psycho-drama. Toni Collette gives an outstanding performance of a mother on the edge of sanity. Her emotive range is spectacular. In one scene she shares grief with another mother and the tears were flowing in my cinema, something that rarely happens in this genre. Excellent cinematography captures the transition from high-tension family grief to a place of ghostly atmospherics, but soon we find the inevitable reliance on standard horror tropes. There may be grounds, however tenuous, for the film to claim originality in creepiness but this is outweighed by an over-reliance on headless bodies, wispy floating forms, and other stock shlock.
Whether this is your horror film of the year will depend on your taste for the fantastic supernatural. The attempt to explain a family’s history of tragedy by invoking a ghostly masterplan will be unsatisfying for many. Yet some films in this genre can genuinely haunt you, like the deeply reflective A Ghost Story (2017)that inhabits the terrifying space between death and afterlife, or A Monster Calls (2017) that uses the supernatural to explore fear of death. Hereditarystarts with much potential but settles for the simpler goal of scaring you. These days, fans of this genre expect more.
Director: Ari Aster
Stars: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro
CineMuseFilms 
Really dig your approach to this film. Awesome neutral review! Looking forward to reading and chatting it up about movies!
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Nice to hear from you Ric; love your work.
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You were far more generous with this assessment than I.
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Conversely, you were pretty tough.
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When you have the money, the pedigree, and a director of photography that can light a set so that gradients in shadow are crystal clear, there’s really no excuse to put something together this ambiguous. I see far too many movies every year that does things for no reason and end too early or too late for anything to appear satisfactory.
My default example of this is ‘Nocturnal Animals,’ a story within a story so the sloppy internal fiction can be forgiven while the external narrative doesn’t have to be resolved — so clever… and also a cheat. If your studio is going to advertise how scary your movie is, they’d better bring it because I’ve seen it all.
Hereditary really wants to be The VVitch when it grows up.
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LOL! I like your style. For my part, I gave the film credit for Toni Collette’s extraordinary peformance and the intensity of the first half which is a strong psycho-drama on grief before it runs out of originality and resorts to standard spook. Its far from a failure, just unfulfilled potential.
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Oh, and I loved the hell out of A Monster Calls. Now that’s how you combine fantasy with the realism of a grieving broken family, folks.
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Amen, Grim D Reaper.
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I’m too chicken to go see it, but I enjoyed reading your review.
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Hi CineMuse. Not one shred of subtlety in this film (watched today). In the first quarter I thought it was going to run along similar lines to “Tully”. How wrong I was! By the last quarter I thought Toni Collette has used up all her stored, acting credits by hamming it up. What a travesty for such a capable performer. I blame the director!
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Ouch…”Not one shred of subtlety in this film”. I’m not sure thats true, although I can see why many would reach this conclusion. I was impressed with the narrative arc until the psycho-drama slipped into a macabre fantasy. That is normal in this genre as filmmakers never know how to finish the story; once you cross over the line all logic can be abandoned. Like you, by the last quarter I was ready to bail out.
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And…..like you, I saw promise in the beginning. At this point it seemed as if it was going to progress along rational lines and ominous music helped build the tension.
At some point it jumped the shark (or whatever the expression fitting all loss of credibility). This may have been the point when the daughter’s severed head was found on the driveway. I think Toni Collette’s acting took a turn to bathos at this stage and I wondered why a sensible actor would comply.
All downhill from there.
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The severed head still held me in place; after all, it was in the realm of plausibility because thats what would happen if you stuck you head out of a car window close to a pole. The brother’s reaction was also plausible as was the rest of the family. It was well after the grief counselling sessions that things got wobbly for me. We clearly have different tolerance thresholds for nonsense Anita.
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Thanks for these thoughts. I enjoyed reading this.
I think labels are circumscribing people’s reactions and even what they think it is “appropriate” to say when giving their reactions. I feel the same way about the “coming of age” label and was endlessly annoyed by reviews of Lady Bird and Call Me By Your Name that first had to reckon with how the movies did or didn’t fit the expectations of the “coming of age genre.” When I watched Hereditary, I didn’t get the sense that it was “trying too hard” to “scare” as the film progresses. But then again, the word “scary” is a complicated word because there is one specific way it is meant when it is used, so people apply that one sense of the word in their evaluations of “scary” films instead of opening up the word to allow for a wider range of interpretation. Films often carry multiple labels. Perhaps this film’s first label is drama. If we’re going to label and hold a film accountable to labels, maybe we should do so proportionally—and also not forget to open up words like “scary” and “horror.” I think “drama” is already seen as broad enough! Again, I enjoyed reading your review, and thanks for being the catyalyst for my finally coming out with these words. I’ve been thinking about this since I saw the film and started listening to/reading reviews.
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catalyst. Sorry!
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Thank you for such an interesting contribution to the conversation ChadEHarris. Genre labels have always been standard currency in filmic language and it continues to provide the framework for film literacy. But as with all rules, things start to get exciting when they are bent or broken. Marketers are the chief corruptors of communication about film; they want it all at the box office. But at least genre labels provide a starting point for discussion. Hereditary is several films in one, but the mix is awkward and for me, ultimately disappointing despite having excellent ingredients.
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