Review: Hereditary (2018)

Hereditary (2018)

Rated R for horror violence, disturbing images, language, drug use and brief graphic nudity

Score: 5 out of 5

The last few years have seen the rise of a subgenre that some critics have taken to calling "post-horror", defined by films like The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch, It Comes at Night, and A Ghost Story. So-called post-horror often does not play by the rules of modern mainstream horror, instead throwing back to older, slower-burning horror films from the '70s while mixing in influences from thrillers and dramas and a large amount of metaphor and commentary; the ghosts and monsters on the surface are never the obvious source of these films' real scares, which often only really kick in after you've had time to think about what the movie's about. As such, they often win rapturous acclaim from horror fans and critics alike, but at the cost of alienating mainstream audiences who wonder where the scary parts are. Regardless, many of the tropes of post-horror have started to creep into mainstream horror films, most notably with last year's sleeper hit (and Academy Award winner) Get Out and with this year's A Quiet Place.

Hereditary plays very much in that wheelhouse, right down to it being produced by A24, an upstart studio that has become almost as inextricably linked with post-horror as Blumhouse is with its particular brand of more mainstream, low-budget horror. True to form, this film currently enjoys not only critical acclaim but also very good audience ratings from IMDb, but it has also earned a pitiful D+ from Cinemascore, which notably polls a random sample of moviegoers rather than IMDb's self-selecting film geek audience; like most post-horror, this isn't for everyone. However, for those looking to give it their time, they will find on the surface an outstanding performance by Toni Collette and a combination of slowly-mounting dread and grisly images that remain stuck in my head, and beneath that, a story about how difficult it can be to escape the legacy of one's family that wound up hitting very close to home.

Our main characters are the Grahams, a family living in a big, rustic house in Utah, paid for by the mother Annie's hobby-turned-job of creating and photographing small figurines and sets in dioramas based on events from her life, to be sold in coffee-table books. (Way to go saving on exposition.) Her mother Ellen recently passed away in her old age, and from everything we see, Annie is not at all unhappy about that fact, having grown to hate Ellen towards the end of her life for emotionally abusing her and her husband Steven while attempting to dig her claws into her kids, the teenage son Peter and adolescent daughter Charlie. It soon becomes apparent to Annie just how little she knew about the very secretive Ellen, who she learns was into spiritualism after a) discovering some books on the subject among Ellen's personal items, and b) some weird, spooky shit starts happening around the house.

I will leave the plot description right there partly for the sake of spoilers, and partly because I can mention anything important and non-spoiler-worthy just as easily by discussing the actors. Everybody here delivers a fine performance, with Gabriel Byrne ably playing the straight man who wonders if his wife is going crazy (even if his American accent is fairly shaky), and Alex Wolff and Millie Shapiro doing great as, respectively, the film's co-protagonist and an archetypal "creepy kid" who has a very unique twist put on her character. However, you cannot talk about this film without discussing Toni Collette as Annie. I have seen and heard other critics say that Collette legitimately deserves an Oscar nomination for her performance here (and that she likely won't get it because, duh, this is a horror movie), and I can say that she delivers an absolute standout performance here. This was a role that could've easily gone horribly wrong and slid into the realm of camp, and a lesser actor than Collette would've turned Annie into a caricature. Collette had a very fine line to skate here, and the fact that she pulled it off with flying colors is a testament to her talent and skill as an actor. Without spoiling anything, she reminded me of Essie Davis as Amelia in The Babadook, a film that I was often reminded of while watching this (coincidentally, both Collette and The Babadook are Australian); both films are about mothers dealing with the loss of a loved one who are now facing supernatural occurrences connected to such that threaten their families while pushing them to the edge of sanity. However, unlike Amelia, Annie's emotion is something other than grief. While we never see Ellen except in apparitions, Collette does a great job conveying that Annie utterly hated Ellen and the influence Ellen had developed over Annie's children; her only problem is that she feels somewhat guilty openly talking about how happy she is that Ellen's finally dead, only working up the courage to do so at (ironically) a group grief counseling session. At risk of putting too much of my own personal life in this review, I will say that I felt like I was watching a supernatural horror take on my own family's experiences. I saw a great deal of my mother in Annie, in terms of her fraught relationship with my grandmother towards the end of the latter's life.

Of course, none of this would've been half as effective if writer/director Ari Aster, in his feature film debut, didn't know how to make an absolutely terrifying chiller. As noted above, this is not an in-your-face haunted house movie; it's more interested in putting things just in the corner of the frame so that there's something deeply unsettling about many shots. It's one of those movies where, to quote an old internet meme, you don't realize what's wrong at first, but when you see it, you'll shit bricks. The motif of the dollhouse dioramas that Annie builds and photographs is used to great effect, most notably in the opening scene, framed as though we're watching this family in just such a set; it produces a very unique atmosphere that leans into the artificiality of the film sets to great effect. There are very few special effects shots in this movie, but when they arrive, they hit like a left hook to the face, most notably a rotting severed head that, when combined with who it belonged to, had my jaw agape (and the rest of the theater saying "good God!" and variations thereof) as I realized that the film actually "went there". The real shock imagery is saved for an absolutely balls-out ending that leaves no easy answers to the film's storyline, but somehow still feels like an appropriate conclusion to the comparatively down-to-Earth drama of the first two acts despite going to levels that most mainstream horror films are afraid to touch.

The Bottom Line

Combining domestic drama with slow-burn horror that erupts into an inferno in the climax, Hereditary is a movie that sneaks up on you and sticks with you all the way home. It's a very unusual film, but if you like your horror films weird, you can't miss this.