Hereditary: A Modern Greek Tragedy
Is it worse to ruin yourself or to be a helpless cog in a machine?
My love and appreciation for Hereditary have only increased every time I’ve revisited it. What was initially just a terrifying horror to me has slowly become a harrowing family drama turned Greek tragedy with each viewing. Ari Aster created a masterpiece with the film and It is definitely one of the best horror films I’ve ever seen and one of the most promising and impressive directorial debuts of recent years.
I’m sure most reading this have seen or at least know the basic premise of this film but for the few of you that don’t, Hereditary is about the Graham Family. When the Graham’s grandma and Family matriarch passes away, the family start to discover her sinister past and how she has secretly tied their fates into sinister deals of occult origin.
Visually this film is astonishing. The house where the story takes place is the type of house many dream of. Beautiful, spacious, surrounded by elegant greenery and large but still homey. The house is beautiful and the camerawork from Pawel Pogorzelski amazingly captures all of the house’s elegant cosiness. Pawel has worked on all of Aster's projects and his camerawork has been consistently great from what I’ve seen. I specifically like Aster’s 2014 Short, Basically, and one of my favourite things about the visuals in that film was how open it was. This film is no different.
The house feels spacious and is filled with things you’d expect from a typical family, however, as the film goes on, this wide-open space begins to feel cold. This is a film about a family that couldn’t be further apart from each other and the visuals reflect this. Everything feels vacant and foreboding, ultimately visualising the relationship between the family. Pawel also uses a lot of interesting camera movements in the film, especially in the film's more frightening moments. Towards the latter half of the film, when the stakes are ramping up. The camera starts to move with our character's mindsets. Tilting into unorthodox angles as their mental states start to go further and further into disarray.
One of the most unsettling things about the camerawork of this film is the amount of stuff hidden in the frame. Throughout the film, there are signs of Paimon and his cult members cleverly hidden in shots and a lot of them are really easy to miss if you’re not looking for them, however, once you do notice it’s truly petrifying. Especially in the film's final act where the cult slowly begins to come out of hiding and we see them surrounding the house, puppeteering the final events.
The acting in this film is amazing, for the most part. The majority of the cast do a great job however the one who definitely steals the show is Toni Collete as Annie. She perfectly plays a woman on the edge of a string. She’s just lost her mother and daughter in quick succession and she’s dealing with a family full of many unresolved issues as well as her own internal unresolved issues. All this emotion comes out through her performance which is equally as shocking as it is harrowing. Even after multiple viewings, I’m still left speechless by the dinner table scene where she lets all of her emotions explode out of her and I can’t help but feel horrible as we see her descended further and further into madness as the film progresses.
In the final scenes, we see a woman who has completely lost it. Her reality is a lie and she is desperate to fix it all, willing to kill herself to end all the pain. Toni Collette perfectly captures the pure desperation Annie is feeling and she gives an incredibly unforgettable performance. However, the reason I said the acting was amazing, for the most part, is because of Alex Wolff’s performance. In certain scenes of this film, I think he’s terrific. For example, I think the scene with him in the car is one of the best scenes in the film and it is a fantastic showing of visual acting. Saying so much with so little.
However, in other scenes, I found his performance weak or downright laughable, more specifically in the scenes where he has to cry. In the dream sequence, I can excuse his over-exaggerated childlike wails as part of Annie’s memory of the real events however He still sounds like this in the reality sections. His honestly hilarious crying really takes you out of the experience because you can’t take him seriously and his weak acting really shines when he’s stood next to someone like Toni Collete, who makes him look even worse.
What I love so much about Hereditary is that at its core it’s an intense family drama surrounded by horror elements. Legendary horror director Val Lewton believed that all horror films must work without horror. You must tell a human story first before you bring in the supernatural. I 100% agree with this sentiment because once you have a human story to relate to you become so much more invested in what’s happening, making the horror even scarier.
The reason this film was so scary to me was because I cared. I cared about what happened to this family because I cared about each of their individual struggles and their struggles to keep themselves together as a family. This investment into the family itself made me worry for them so much and the first time I watched this film in theatres I was literally shaking in the final act.
To me, one of the ways I look at this film is as a film about concealing the truth, running away from the truth, or a film about complete ignorance of the truth. Everyone in this family runs away from things rather than dealing with their problems.
Both Annie and Peter avoid each other and chose to ignore the problems in their relationship rather than deal with the problems they both know are there. Steve Hides the truth about the grave to Annie. Peter runs away from his sister’s death, instead choosing to leave it for his mother to find out about. Annie even spells out this theme in the dinner table scene where she angrily exclaims “Nobody in this family owns up to what they’ve done.”
This is the central problem for this family and it ultimately leads to their downfall. Nobody deals with their shit. This theme links Hereditary to the Greek tragedy Women of Trachis by Sophocles, which is mentioned by Peter’s teacher. In the story, the protagonist, Heracles, ignores all the signs that point to his coming death. This is similar to how the family ignores all the problems between them and all these problems eventually lead to their deaths. More on the Greek tragedy inspiration later.
The film is horror at its finest for me. Aster utilises subtlety and most of the scariest moments in this film don’t come from the big typical scares but the hidden ones. Whether that be something hidden in a frame or something hidden in the plot. Like I said earlier once you notice the hidden scares you’re constantly on edge but what's more unsettling is when you notice the hidden actions of the cult.
As the story goes on we start to learn and understand a lot more about the cult and their plans and the elaborate planning they’ve performed to orchestrate this ritual is terrifyingly impressive but also makes the story seemingly hopeless. Everything is set out for the family from the start and once you realise this, the films become a lot scarier as you try to figure out how they will all die and it becomes infinitely more tragic.
The inevitability of the protagonist’s deaths is what makes this film a modern greek tragedy. A greek tragedy is a type of ancient Greek play in which the protagonist, falls to disaster through the combination of a personal failing and circumstances with which he or she cannot deal. This definition perfectly describes this film because the family’s downfall is caused by both themselves and uncontrollable forces.
Their personal failing is their aforementioned lack of connection. No one in this family understands each other and no one tries to. They don’t speak to each other and the distance between them allows them to descend further and further down the cult’s plan. However, the cult and Paimon contribute to the other aspect of a greek tragedy. The circumstances that the protagonists cannot control.
We learn that the events of this film have been planned for years. Every event was foretold and orchestrated by the cult. No choice the family makes is really made by them, and this inevitability and complete lack of control solidify the film as a Greek tragedy. Aster cleverly embeds the idea of this theme in the film through the class scenes and even challenges the audience to think about the idea of a tragedy. Is the narrative tragic because of their self-destruction or Does the family's lack of control make their deaths more tragic? Is it worse to ruin yourself or to be a helpless cog in a machine?
This idea is also reinforced in the film's visual imagery. Most explicitly in the doll miniatures which Annie creates. While these are a normal part of the story as they are Annie’s job, these dolls also represent the idea of control. Throughout the film, Annie recreates scenes from the film in doll form, unaware that what she is creating is essentially the reality she is living in. The cult creates all these scenes in the same way Annie does however their dolls aren’t made of clay but are instead the family themselves. The Graham family is not even a family at all. They are nothing more than Pawns in the cults evil machinations.
