Hereditary review: Not the scariest film you'll ever see - but you won't forget it

1/10
Matthew Norman15 June 2018

The only false note in Hereditary — which despite the hype is far from the scariest horror film since The Exorcist but may be the most horrifying — comes right at the end.

After a climax demented enough to straddle the border between the spine-tingling and the comical, a cover of Joni Mitchell’s wistful Both Sides Now serenades the closing credits.
Being a 30-year-old American, writer and first-time feature director Ari Aster is excused his ignorance of UK novelty hits from almost 40 years ago. After this precociously masterful debut, he could be forgiven almost anything short of genocide.

Even so, he probably should have ended with There’s No One Quite Like Grandma by the St Winifred’s School Choir. “Grandma we love you, grandma we do,” as mature readers will recall the opening verse in all its lyrical majesty. “Though you may be far away, we think of you.”

The grandma of Hereditary could hardly be further away since the film opens with her burial. But for a screen absentee she has a powerfully brooding presence that obliges us to think of her more and more.

In an unusually candid funeral eulogy, ungrieving daughter Annie Graham (Toni Collette) describes her as difficult and secretive, with a love of “private rituals”. Later, she frets about not feeling sadder. Had she understood the opaque note she finds in the spiritualism book among the old girl’s effects — “Don’t hate me. Our sacrifices will pale in the end next to our rewards” — she would have jettisoned that guilt.

Although Aster’s style is determinedly languid as he layers the emotional complexities and scatters ominous narrative threads, he waits until that frantic denouement to knit together, he is swift to establish the family’s peculiarity.

Annie and her stolid therapist husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) live in a large wooden house with a plethora of atmospherically underlit rooms and a spooky treehouse in the garden, all secluded in lush forestry.

Their 18-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff) is a feckless stoner who should have paid more attention to his classics teacher’s ruminations on how Sophoclean characters ignore the clues about their impotence in the face of malevolent fate.

Their daughter Charlie, 13, is sensationally odd. She snips heads off dead pigeons, fills sketch pads with macabre drawings, makes the clicky tongue noise that becomes such a sinister aural motif and echoes an earlier Toni Collette child from The Sixth Sense by seeing dead people.

The casting of Milly Shapiro, fresh from wowing Broadway as Matilda, was as inspired as the make-up artist’s work. Charlie’s face, at once little girlish and as ancient as an Inca stone carving, is the creepiest element in a very crowded field. Shapiro lands an unlikely double herself, making the unsmiling, barely speaking Charlie sympathetic as well as massively offputting.

As ghoulishly isolated as the house is, its inhabitants are more so. Annie, an artist, closets herself away constructing the dolls’ houses in which she recreates scenes from her life in perfectionist detail, in a pitiably futile effort to impose some kind of order on a life about to veer wildly out of control.

Without giving too much away, let it suffice that badgering an unwilling late- teenage son to take his unsociable kid sister to a party is something about which the concerned parent may want to think twice. The results are horrific, emotionally and aesthetically, and launch a corkscrew spin towards hell.

Hand on heart (literally: I was checking for fear-induced, chest-thumping tachycardia), at no moment was I terrified. But terror and horror are different beasts, and Hereditary is unforgettably horrifying.

While the calamities that befall the Grahams throw up (as you may be tempted to do by the one involving ants) some gloriously gruesome shots, Aster uses them to address two of the grander questions.

One stretches back beyond even Sophocles. Is there really such a thing as free will, or are we the playthings of predetermined destiny? The other, almost as modern as DNA science, is whether environment or heredity is the dominant influence.

As Annie unwittingly begins unravelling the answers, with help from the seemingly sweet woman (Ann Dowd) she meets at a bereavement support group who encourages her to hold seances, she unravels herself.

Collette’s portrayal of uncontainable psychic pain, vocally and in the anguishing close-ups that magnify her grief, is staggeringly intense. In one monologue she recounts the gothic horrors her mother inflicted on her father and brother. In others she turns viciously on her son, as if powerless to resist visiting the sins of the mother on herself, telling him she never wanted him and did all she could to miscarry.

Despite Collette’s unremitting brilliance and Shapiro’s astonishingly assured screen debut, this is Aster’s film. The wide range of cinematic influences (most strikingly, Rosemary’s Baby) do not compromise the originality of his perspective. As with last year’s Get Out, which framed an examination of racism within the horror format, he uses the conventions of the genre —blood and gore, apparitions — to transcend it.

The production notes mention him enduring an unspecified but horrendous sequence of family disasters that left him feeling cursed. But there is no floundering here for cut-price catharsis; no glibly consoling message about therapy or love or art or anything being able to save us if the cosmic dice fall atrociously.

On reflection, Doris Day’s Que Sera, Sera (from Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much) might have been an even more searingly ironic closing track. Whatever will be will be is the unflinchingly bleak and horrifying truth that helps make Hereditary a bigger and more important film than the hype on the posters suggests.

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1/10

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