Mark Reviews Movies: HEREDITARY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 7, 2018

A film that opens with the text of an obituary is telling you exactly what to expect. That's how Hereditary, an incredibly creepy piece of misdirection, opens. It's a film about death, obviously, and from that basic idea, writer/director Ari Aster, making his feature debut, takes us through a chilling exploration of mourning and madness.

Its structure and methods mostly resemble those of a generic horror movie, in which some creepy things are foreshadowed and characters wander through a dark house at night, while the audience awaits the inevitable moment that something pops into frame. Aster, though, doesn't quite give us the payoff to those scenes. His film doesn't much care about scaring us. It would rather burrow beneath the skin, instructing us to be afraid of the shadows and the corners of rooms. That's where visions or ghosts or people waiting to do ill things could be—and increasingly are—hiding in plain sight (Pawel Pogorzelski's cinematography is cunning in how it uses shadows and slivers of light to keep us searching the frame for something).

The film's more traditional horror sequences exist here to help maintain a constant sense of dread about what is or could be happening to these characters. It keeps changing our perspective of the characters, the rationale behind the strange occurrences in the house and elsewhere, and our understanding of the forces at work in these lives. One could view the story's final turn as a bit of a cheat, except that Aster's screenplay is rather meticulous in putting all of the necessary information in front of us throughout the film. If it feels dishonest, that's only because the film is so effective at repeatedly tricking us into thinking it's about one thing, only to evolve into being about this, that, and the other.

At first, the story is about a family, living in a grand house in the middle of the woods. The parents are Annie (Toni Collette) and Steve Graham (Gabriel Byrne). She's a model maker who designs intricate, miniature spaces. The opening shot is an impressive cheat, which begins by scanning Annie's workshop before moving slowly into a single room in a recreation of the Grahams' home. A seamless cut takes us from the miniature room into the real one, and in retrospect, the entire sequence serves as an early sign of how Aster intends to play with our perception of what's happening here.

In the real room is the Grahams' son Peter (Alex Wolff), a bit of a slacker who, like most teenagers, doesn't say much to his parents, except to tell an occasional lie about school or his evening plans. Their other child is a daughter named Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who's even quieter than her big brother. Her trademark is an almost reflexive clucking of the tongue—a sound that later haunts the soundtrack.

This is the day of the funeral of Annie's mother, who was a domineering presence in Annie's life. No one in the family seems too upset about the loss, save for Charlie, whom the grandmother raised as if she were her own daughter. Annie's models include a diorama of her mother dying in hospice care and a truly unnerving scene of a mother nursing a baby, while an older woman stands above them with her own breast exposed in a desperate sort of offer.

To tell more about the specifics of the story would be unfair, because Aster has some real doozies up his sleeve. There's another death—and a genuine horror of one, too, in the way it seems both inevitable, because of the relentlessness of Lucian Johnston and Jennifer Lame's editing, and a surprise, because of the sheer audacity of what happens.

The family takes this one harder. Annie becomes a nervous wreck. We start to learn the extent of some mental instability in her past—namely sleepwalking, which led to an episode involving some paint thinner, her children, and a match. She later turns to the supernatural with the help of Joan (Ann Dowd), whom Annie meets at a support group, hoping for some answers.

Peter is left in shock, strolling into the house after the death as if nothing happened, and experiencing what appears to be vision-inducing guilt. Steve tries his best to keep the family together, but his loyalties are torn. He seems like an unnecessary character in the bigger scheme of things, but it's a sign of Aster's genuine compassion for these characters that Steve has a moment in which he allows himself to feel the full weight of his burden. Mostly, the family ends up as quiet as Charlie.

What's most impressive here is that Aster has given us a horror film that works just as strongly as a drama—examining how grief affects these characters. The horror elements—those visions and ghosts and long walks through dark spaces—serve to emphasize and complement the mood of sorrow, resentment, guilt, and anger.

The characters come first here, with Collette's performance serving as a sort of tonal barometer for the film's evolution into new realms. She's incredibly effective here, giving both a fully developed performance and guiding the story toward its seemingly out-of-left-field (but actually logical—as strange as it may be) climax. Wolff is quite good, too, transforming Peter from a self-centered teen, to the audience's focal point of sympathy, and, ultimately, to a tragic figure of fate beyond his control (He should have paid attention during a class on Greek theater, but then again, what good would it do?).

All of this eventually moves into the realm of the supernatural, but Aster has grounded his story in such human concerns that the shift isn't distracting (There are enough hints—strange words and iconography scattered throughout various locations—that it doesn't feel like an afterthought, either). Hereditary has a sturdy through line of mounting fear, taking us from death—something we know but don't fully understand—to insanity—something we can understand but only truly know from experience—to something that we neither know nor understand. It's a harrowing and unnerving ride.

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