When a movie, particularly of the horror genre, truly confounds and disturbs people, superlatives often follow en masse. It’s easier to generalize such a visceral viewing event as “the scariest film since The Exorcist” or one that’s “absolutely terrifying” than it is to identify and articulate what makes it so confounding and disturbing (and indeed absolutely terrifying). Sometimes, searching that cave isn’t worth the psychological dive. And even if explored, the nuances at the bottom are likely to vary widely based on the internal makeup of each viewer. In the case of Hereditary, a slow-burning character drama that pokes and scrapes and tears at the achingly personal familial trauma of its unwitting keepers, its layers — some explicated through heartbreaking confession, others insinuated in rigid moments of silent closeup and suggestive imagery — reveal themselves down to their rotting roots. The means by which those layers are purged onto a specific relationship in the story solidifies Hereditary as an all-time dread machine and cracks an unlikely window of opportunity for its most prominent actor to transcend the best expectations of individual theatre in horror cinema.
In William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, historical religious mythology — a demon accidentally unearthed by an archeological dig — is the bedrock upon which its thematic focus (a mother desperately trying to protect her daughter) is toured. When the strange happenings start, they gestate alongside an unfurling medical procedural drama before exploding into an effects-laden visual-horror gag fest that suggests a deep instrumentality on the catalogue of David Cronenberg in hindsight. It’s critical in any form of storytelling to establish familiar keypoints between the subjects and the story’s audience; the more familiar or invested the audience, the more affected they’ll be by the subjects’ drama. The Exorcist makes that connection by framing a curious and naive 12-year-old girl, Regan, as the audience’s emotional interest, which makes the violence done to her especially painful and memorable to viewers (and apparently to Linda Blair, the actress who portrayed her). But the film is segmented by clear production agendas (not a negative, simply a structural technique): the initial segment establishes a force (the spirit); the next our helpless sufferer (Regan); and all the rest bluntly unleash Hell onto her and onto us. Of what we learn of Regan, 95% comes within her brief stretch of characterization.
In Hereditary, the film’s first-time feature writer-director, Ari Aster, employs a saucier strategy: rather than partition his chapters, he blends multiple character arcs into wicked foreboding, and, in an overview, that’s the entirety of the film, but with some Horror Movie Stuff sprinkled in: the misery in The Exorcist has its own designated screentime, clearly following the opening and then the character building; the misery in Hereditary is everything that happens inverse to its blatant fright gimmicks.
Aster yearns to expose the most sensitive underpinnings of genuine family dysfunction a person can imagine — we’re not talkin’ about casual “dysfunction” here; this shit is the real shit — and, mercifully (or perhaps maliciously), he takes no shortcuts: the more familiar or invested the audience, the more affected they’ll be by the subjects’ drama. He claws and claws and claws for two hours, never softening his clutch even when a spooky payoff is owed or near, and it works because his relentless probing is primarily confined to two characters — Toni Collette’s riveting and inconsolable Annie; and her doomed son Peter, the tragic protagonist whose ineffable fear is wrung to the last drop by Alex Wolff and is ultimately the film’s most unforgettable and scarring element — who reward and catalyze his pacing.
25 minutes into Hereditary, its trajectory is hardly fresh: a death, a grieving family, a forlorn child (the deceased’s “favorite,” naturally) who takes it worse than everyone else. The child, the inconspicuously-named Charlie (Milly Shapiro), a girl, is an oddball whose androgynous features are accentuated by wardrobe and etiquette (she even comments that her grandma, the person who died, wanted her to be a boy). She nonchalantly gazes upon her grandma’s corpse in its casket while chomping on a chocolate bar. Later, she scissors a dead bird’s head off and puts it in her saggy sweatshirt pocket. She collects and crafts from scrap trash and hair of mysterious origins. She sleeps alone in a treehouse in the woods on the family’s lot in freezing conditions. And she clucks, of course. Charlie is an amalgam of horror tropes who initially passes as a fair stand-in — perhaps even an interesting one, but not unexpected. Okay, this movie is about Charlie, we think.
Well, Aster is keen to our expectations. He knows these things — he knows us. And he’s setting us up, masterfully.
Around the 30-minute mark, Peter is connived by his moody mom to bring Charlie with him to a high school party at which Charlie unknowingly consumes peanuts, to which she’s allergic. She devolves into anaphylaxis and Peter rushes her to a hospital. On the way — on a black, unlit county road — Peter swerves to avoid roadkill, and Charlie, who juts her head out the window to suck for air, is decapitated by a street pole. Um. Okay. I guess this movie isn’t about Charlie. Peter, shocked to stone, stares ahead blankly, his eyes welling. Aster savors this perspective for a solid 30 seconds. It’s jarring, it’s wrenching, it’s awful. Peter, in his stupor, drives home, parks the car crookedly in the driveway, walks into the house, and goes to bed.
This is the point in The Exorcist where Friedkin opens the proverbial floodgates — first by an inch, then by a foot, then he blasts the barrier all the way free. This is the point in Hereditary where Aster sinks his nails into the wound and starts tugging it open. We want a jolt at this point; we want a scare, a release. Aster knows these things — he knows us. And it’s too much fun for him to spoil, so he doubles down: the next sound we hear is Annie wailing at the discovery of her headless daughter in the backseat the following morning, tailed seamlessly by her continued screams in a separate scene, as her quiet husband, Steve (a smartly understated outing for Gabriel Byrne), holds her for (futile) consolation. It’s easy to feel like you’re at the apex of discomfort when Aster cruelly voyeurs Peter’s face in the instant aftermath of Charlie’s death. Until Aster, defying the cheap thrill mandated by vanilla horror formula, truly unchains Collette and her curdling vocals to drill out as much agony as is tolerable. (I’ve never experienced a movie scream that upsetting. Never.)
I think it’s this directorial chess move that signatures Hereditary’s distinction from “typical” or anticipated, and it’s certainly the launchpad from which the movie consciously commits to — in opposition of veering from — its course as a psychodrama fixated on Annie’s maternal instincts and how they interact with Peter’s survival instincts, a dichotomy that crashes into itself several times onward, each time representing climaxes of tension, anguish, and bonafide terror.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
The greatest trick Aster pulls is seeding curiosity and uncertainty surrounding Annie’s behavior by dumping the film’s myriad themes into her trials — widening the substance so much that we can’t pinpoint where (or if) the details align with Annie’s upbringing, mental state, or spiritual assault. The audience’s struggles to puzzle the mess together are shared by Peter (though his knowledge is only interpreted and secondhand, so he’s less-informed than we are), and his plight is the atom at the heart of the narrative and which makes us feel so despaired watching him. His last conscious act in the film is crazed, but it’s comprehensible.
As is declared in the bonkers (and artistically-assured) finale, Paimon, one of Hell’s eight demon kings, was cluelessly invoked by Annie at the influence of Joan (Ann Down, in perfect tune), a kindly snake who manipulates Annie’s grief in what is surely the most despicable heist ever conceived. Paimon covets a young male body to possess, and Charlie’s grandmother, the Queen of a local church to Paimon, had hoped Charlie could serve as the host (there’s an abundance of breadcrumbs that suggest she does). But Peter was always the endgame. As Annie’s personality warts (notably her micromanaging nature, illustrated poignantly by Aster’s use of diorama) and possible genetic mental illness(es) froth to a boil, she aims her angers at Peter and casts her own shortcomings onto him, even accusing him of hating her because of an incident years ago in which she doused him and herself (and Charlie) in paint thinner and struck a match while sleepwalking before waking up and expelling the flame. During the two instances of Annie’s possession (whether there are more is arguable — a flawless execution of Aster’s writing), she preys on Peter: First, she strong-arms his participation in a seance to summon Charlie’s ghost, which he agrees to as atonement for his responsibility in Charlie’s death. And second — in a sequence that spans 15 minutes until the finale and begins with one of the most genius and unnerving shots in genre history — she literally chases him into the attic, where he witnesses something so dismaying that he opts to simply throw himself out of the third-floor dormer window rather than be alive. When Peter’s body rises from the garden where it landed, pierced by a phantom light miming the presence of Paimon, the “typical” path of the film’s first act ends where it began — a circle complete — but now with the context that our preconceptions were used against us by a filmmaker in complete, cold-blooded control of his art and its audience.
A “typical” film Hereditary is not. But it is great, and it’s maybe one of the greats.
Score: 9/10
