There's a new trend in horror movies that separates the artists in the audience from the consumers. The consumers want action, want blood, want jump-scares and sex and novelty. The artists want dread, nuance, beauty, craft, and, yes, no small amount of novelty. Sometimes the audiences agree, but often they do not. But the trend involves low-budget filmmaking and expert artistry in ways that subvert expectations, honor conventions while creating something new, and forces attentive viewers to feel their icy grip long after the movie has ended.
Think of The Witch. It Comes at Night. It Follows. The cream of the crop in this new age of horror films. They have to be good, because they have to make a new space. The last decade was dominated by remakes of classics (especially '70s slashers). Our current decade has made horror a television phenomenon (AHS, Bates Motel, Hannibal, and so many more). Anything not on the television is being dominated by movie universes from big studios (Insidious, the Conjuring). So these new films, while still meta-fictionally referencing the tradition, rely not on cheap effects and loud noises to terrify but rather get us to care about the characters while they slowly seek to upend our understanding of horror as a genre.
And Hereditary is no different.
I don't want to share any of the plot with you. Usually I love spoilers and prefer to know the story so that I can focus on the filmmaking techniques, but in this case the pleasure of unraveling the movie as you go along is a major part of the film's strength. Essentially -- and very briefly -- a grandmother passes away, and her daughter's family slowly begins to disintegrate into paranoia, fear, mistrust, and of course violence. Family secrets are dangerous things, and sometimes the things we inherit from our ancestors are even thicker than blood.
I can't speak highly enough of this film, so I'll hit the main points and then just beg you to go see it. First, Toni Collette is incredible. This is the role of a lifetime and easily one of her best performances. As the matriarch of her family by dire circumstance, she embodies the fear and horror we all face as our families begin to fall apart. She is able to contort her face into such grotesque shapes that more than once I wondered if she'd be the next Lon Chaney, and if her visage had been augmented by effects they could not have been creepier.
Second, Alex Wolff plays her son, an incredibly difficult role, with some amazing skill. Forget Timothee Chalamet, this is the young actor everyone should be losing minds over. He spends most of the movie crying and screaming, and I've never seen an adolescent actor do so much with so little. It's like seeing Johnny and Leonardo in What's Eating Gilbert Grape.
Third, Ari Aster is amazing. For a first-time feature director, he has an amazing sense of confidence in his craft. Every detail is immaculate. His emotional sense is a masterclass in directing. Every beat of the film is fleshed out, and we are forced to feel every tiny nuance. Each scene induces feelings of cerebral whiplash as the screenplay (also by Aster) turns from almost-funny to aggressively weird and terrifying. And while his film constantly references other films in the genre, it also sets itself apart as a new beast of the genre. Its clearest references are to The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby, but it never feels like a cheap remake or ripoff, as it repurposes those references to fashion its own image.
The film's twists and turns come at breakneck pace. Though the third act doesn't, for me, go where I expected or even wanted, I cannot deny the power of Aster's vision and his faithfulness to it. I can certainly say that this film doesn't just navigate between honoring specific classic films; it navigates effortlessly between subgenres of horror. Think it's a slasher? Home invasion? Haunted house? Possession? Yes to all, but also no. We're being played by Aster and his team, much like the amazing miniatures featured as the mother's artwork. I don't want to give anything away, just know that you really don't know what's coming.
And, really, when it comes to family, who does?
IMDb: Hereditary
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