For “Hereditary,” The Devil Is In The Details
Ari Aster’s film is deliciously creepy and features a brilliant performance by Toni Collette. It also commits the cardinal horror film sin of explaining too much.
Hereditary is as good as a film can be without actually being great. There’s one great performance, a diabolical slow burn of tension, and some legitimately startling freakouts. Unfortunately, there’s also a few flaws.
One is that the filmmaking is a bit too showy. Another is that it chooses to provide a too-clever-by-half explanation which bleeds the terror out of the theater right when it should be leaving the audience dizzy.
To risk a bad pun, you could actually say the Devil is in the details.
Hereditary starts with Annie (Toni Collette) dealing with unresolved feelings after her mother passes away. The death, as many familial crises do, forces out uncomfortable truths about her relationships with husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and her two children, teenager Peter (Alex Wolff) and pre-teen loner Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Later, at Annie’s insistence, Peter takes Charlie with him to a classmate’s party, which ends terribly for Charlie and further frays the familial bonds. After attending a grief and loss support group, Annie is encouraged by fellow attendee Joan (Ann Dowd) to communicate with the deceased via seance. Needless to say, things get crazier from there.
First things first — this movie wouldn’t be nearly as good without Toni Collette’s performance as Annie. She’s completely convincing as a woman who is grieving the loss of her mother, while trying to sort through their “complicated” relationship. As the film’s events unfold, Collette charts Annie’s descent into depression and possible madness, all exacerbated by her broken relationship with Peter and her frustration with Steve’s unwillingness to take her seriously. Collette’s Annie is one the best characters I’ve seen showing the frayed nerves of loss and feeling completely cut-off from everything she loves and wants.
Collette’s work in Hereditary is the best performance I’ve seen in 2018 so far, and the film is worth watching for her performance alone.
As for the rest of the performers, it’s a mixed bag. Gabriel Byrne brings pathos to Steve: he makes you feel how Steve is trapped between wanting to help his wife and help his son, while taking pains to make sure neither side feels like the other is more important or more correct. Alex Wolff is fine as Peter, but he never quite registers beyond the teenager stoned to cover his own feelings of loneliness and rejection, except for one brutally wrenching family dinner. Milly Shapiro doesn’t get to do much beyond act creepy as Charlie, while Ann Dowd as Joan is suitably hard to read — she does a nice job selling you on Joan’s grief while also making you wonder if there isn’t a hidden agenda luring beneath the surface.
As a piece of filmmaking, Hereditary should be complemented for the tonal control displayed by Ari Aster and his production team. Pawel Pogorzelski’s photography is bone-chillingly cold. Aster and Pogorzelski also utilize depth within the frame nicely; things happen in the background or near the edges, just out of Annie or her family’s view, which nicely echoes the narrative.
The editing by Lucian Johnston and Jennifer Lame and the score by Colin Stetson do a terrific job of keeping you uneasy from the opening frames through to the climax. They do a great job building tension and orchestrating scares that don’t always rely on gore or jump cuts (though Aster isn’t afraid to use them). Hereditary is patient, it starts slowly and seems to meander at times, but the tension builds moment by moment with no release valve. As the film ratcheted up the tension and built momentum, I found myself curled into a ball in the theater.
As I mentioned above, there are two things which hold me back from declaring Hereditary a great film.
One problem I have with Aster’s work is the need to show off. The opening shot is case in point — a moderate oner which starts by looking out a window and ends peering into a diorama of one of the rooms in the house. It‘s the director viewing his characters like ants in an enclosed farm. It’s a fine metaphor for characters being trapped, but it’s also the director telling you he views his characters as insects. There’s no fun, or love in it — it’s too clever by half.
Compare it with Paul Thomas Anderson’s classic opening oner in Boogie Nights and you can feel the difference. One shot shows off how smart and talented the director is. The other shot shows off how much the director wants to tell this story about these characters, and he happens to be really smart and talented.
My other problem with Hereditary is that Aster doesn’t respect his film’s heredity. The crucial difference between Hereditary and another demonic possession story, such as The Exorcist, is that one used demonic possession as a metaphor — such as male anxiety over incipient womanhood. Possession is used in Hereditary as… demonic possession. The film stops itself cold in the final 10 minutes to explain how all of the familial dysfunction, potential madness, and supernatural phenomena is the result of a long-running plot by devil worshipers. Hereditary neuters itself when the film’s climax is reduced to a self-consciously clever mystery plot’s final piece snapping into place, instead of just going for broke and letting the imagination take over. I felt the tension leave the theater in the closing moments.
The best horror films reward multiple viewings and maintain their unsettling power precisely because they don’t explain everything. Hereditary rewards viewers with great atmosphere, delicious slow-burn tension, and a brilliant performance by Toni Collette. It also leaves me wondering how much better it could have been if my imagination had been given some room to play instead of being constrained in a cleverly plotted box.
Final Rating: 3.5 Devil Emojis out of 5
