Ari Aster’s Take on ‘Intellectual Horror’: Hereditary Film Review
Ever since the definition dysmorphia of the horror genre for the sake of entertainment and consumerism, most of the horror films that were produced recently were a replication of a replica, where shock value was seen as a degree of the film’s excellence. Not that I’m against it, (there’s still a purist part of me who thinks it should degenerate into thin air, of course) as it’s made for the audience to forget reality, and to give them a perspective that their own horrors are nothing but a short happenstance — the exact reason why films exists. But films are still seen as a magnifying glass of real life, and horror genre is the exact epitome of our nihilistic desires — that even after all this heart-wrenching, jack and jill-esque stumbling down of happenings, it will continue and just go beyond the expected.
Hereditary is the exact indignation of this perception. Using the stereotypical cult trope and Robert Egger’s psychological horror of The Witch, Hereditary made us think of all the possibilities and ended up going with the waves of madness and one heck of a rollercoaster nightmare. It is either you’ll go out laughing by the David Lynch and The Shining’s distinct, idiosyncratic camera style; or get out scared and hallucinating because you’ve been caught up so well in their psycho-meta spider web. (Yes, just like me.)
Ari Aster’s Hereditary opened the sequence with a metaphorical, well-structured portrayal of a family using a miniature house; something that would be used deliberately, yet purposely in the whole plot. It started with the death of the mother of Annie, giving it a small nudge as something heavy as death, but with all the deliberation of subtleness it mustered, that death is truly the genesis of everything. The film continues the habitual foreshadowing as its core — prophesies together with occult rituals and anything related to, treating their audience as the irrationals and the sceptics they need to convert to prove everything to be true and visual — it is something that’s still magical to me even days after I’ve watched the film.
It became dragging towards the middle, and I thought that the psycho-horror magic is slowly burning away, but it is actually a rich trick for me to call it a solidification of your nightmare — rather than a breather, it is the silent moments that made you realize you’re already way too deep in this, and it will only turn worse: a horror pause just to coined it out. And it definitely turned worse than expected.
This film doesn’t only give you the creeps but also a constant fear under your skin no matter how irrational the ending in comparison to reality, that you should fear for something bigger than your own nightmare Nosferatus. It doesn’t have the scarred trauma in the dark that shock value films can give you, but rather a psychological crawling one; something that ought similar to a depressive episode. (I’m speaking based on my own opinion,) but this film also used mental illness in terms of doing it different from the usual negative depiction, and much closer to von Trier’s Melancholia, where the heavy, dark simulation of depressive mindset was continuous all throughout. It is very hard to capture, but Aster did, and it only added up the tension until the end.
It is indeed a good film, but I’m not going to watch it again for the sake of self-preservation. If ever I mustered the courage, well, this the kind of film that is orgasmic to deconstruct, giving a homage to the ingenious work of Ari Aster and of course, the whole reason why I watched the film — it’s producer: A24.
