I once dated a woman whose grandmother intentionally poisoned dinner meals for her children and eventually cut her own head off with a chainsaw. True story. As I would learn, the crazy vein ran deep in her family. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then again, the relationship ended before I was fully immersed.
Still, my brush with a lifetime of sleeping with one eye open is nothing compared to that of the Graham family, the doomed clan at the heart of writer-director Ari Aster’s brilliant and thoroughly unsettling debut feature, Hereditary.
Mom Annie (Toni Collette, once again proving that there is no genre she can’t command) is an artist who builds richly detailed miniature dioramas. Her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne, perfectly stoic), works in an office. And her children, high school-aged son Peter (Alex Wolff) and 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro, a quiet force of unbridled intensity), are left mostly to their own devices. Peter plays guitar in his room; Charlie is an artist like her mom.
Hereditary opens with an obituary: Annie’s mother, Leah, has died after a long battle with dementia.
Aster wastes no time laying the groundwork. Hereditary is a deliberate experience, and one that demands repeat viewing, because all of the clues are there once you know the endgame. But on first watch, the small details and hints still resonate. This is that rare breed of horror that manipulates even the most innocent of events, like a funeral, or ordinary items, like a framed portrait of the Graham matriarch, into something more sinister.
When Annie addresses the congregates at her mother’s wake, her face tightens into a grim mask. Her mother, she says, was a difficult person. Private, secretive, hard to read. She had her own rituals that even blood relatives could not comprehend.
It’s clear early on that everyone in the Graham clan has issues. This is a family well-schooled in hiding their shame, their insecurities, their guilt. Watching Hereditary, you get the distinct impression that if Annie, Steve, Peter or Charlie were to allow themselves even a sliver of a second of raw, genuine emotion, they might immediately crack open and spill forth a putrid mess.
Annie’s mother’s death sets in motion a sequence of events that will forever change her family and transform them into something unexpected. Trust me, you have no idea where this is going to go, which is a credit to Aster as much as to his unbelievable cast.
Longtime old-school horror fans will pick up on subtle allusions, and I suspect that process will be wholly subjective and specific to each individual viewer. For me, I found a number of similarities to The Sentinel, an obscure but wonderfully dark cult classic from 1977 starring a young Chris Sarandon and a wantonly hedonistic Burgess Meredith.
The more you learn about the Grahams, the more you fear for them, which is exactly the type of connection that a director wants.
Annie reveals tidbits in casual conversations, but without the distracting pomp that most movie characters exhibit when it’s clear they are providing some super important exposition.
Her father, who died just before or immediately after Annie’s birth, starved to death during a fit of madness. Her brother hung himself as a teen. Perhaps most chilling, as Annie explains to a new friend, was the time she awoke from sleepwalking to find herself standing over her children's beds, holding an unlit match. It was only then she realized she had doused them both in paint thinner.
Annie shares that story with Joan (the wonderful Ann Dowd, from The Handmaid’s Tale), a stranger that Annie meets at a support group for grieving relatives. Never mind that Annie knowingly lied to Steve, telling him she was going to a movie instead. By now, Annie is dealing with two tragedies — the death of her mother and another, more crippling loss, which Aster expertly frames in gory detail designed for maximum impact. Annie desperately needs a friend.
Joan shares something with her, too: a flyer she received offering an at-home, open séance. Before long, Joan is encouraging Annie to participate. The resulting sequence represents the craziest, creepiest séance you’ve seen in years. Forget The Conjuring. What Aster accomplishes here is like sticking a fork in a light socket — you feel the jolt deep within. Naturally, Annie takes her newfound knowledge home, keen to test it out herself, even if she doesn’t fully understand the words written in a strange language or what they mean.
So, is Hereditary a ghost story? Yes, and no. It’s more akin to a waking haunt, the kind that spreads like mold, suffocating its host by sucking all the air and life out of a room. But there’s more. So, so much more.
Aster keeps you guessing for an interminable spell, all the while employing a host of parlor tricks that keep upending your expectations. Some scenes feel disjointed because they are framed in a way to disguise the passage of time. Other scenes focus on moments when a core character notices a refraction of light dancing across the floor. Is this meant to symbolize the presence of a spirit? Or something worse? Even the score is disquieting, a cascading cacophony of thunderous jolts intermixed with eerie silence.
Sitting in the theater, you will feel the air tighten as the darkness constricts. If you’ve ever professed to experiencing a case of Spidey sense, you know what I mean. You’ll have an innate understanding that something terrible is about to happen, but you can’t for the life of you look away.
It’s fair to say that Hereditary represents so much more than just a spook-and-mirrors show. Much like 2015’s The Witch or 2014’s It Follows, this is horror birthed from shared experience and crafted with such intelligence that it becomes more terrifying the longer you sit and consider it.
Who hasn’t dealt with a death? How many among us can honestly say they’ve never once thought that their family is cursed?
Hereditary plays to those fears like a kitten with a fly, knocking you about before delving deeper, a lot deeper, until it hits the primordial muck at the back of your soul, the place where all the real nightmares are born.
The final 20-or-so minutes are so batshit crazy that you’ll feel like you’ve been on a roller coaster for 90 minutes that’s just now reached its apex, and the remaining screen time left represents the steep plunge into the abyss.
As shadowy figures flit along a wall or scrabble across the ceiling, as naked strangers emerge from empty, darkened rooms, as people you’ve grown to care about suddenly, spontaneously combust or worse, the full breadth of Aster’s ritualistic nightmare is finally revealed, and boy howdy, it’s a doozy.
Prepare yourselves. You’re going to be thinking about Hereditary for days. You might even dream about it.
That’s assuming, of course, that you can sleep.
John W. Allman has spent more than 25 years as a professional journalist and writer, but he’s loved movies his entire life. Good movies, awful movies, movies that are so gloriously bad you can’t help but champion them. Since 2009, he has cultivated a review column and now a website dedicated to the genre films that often get overlooked and interviews with cult cinema favorites like George A. Romero, Bruce Campbell and Dee Wallace. Contact him at bloodviolenceandbabes.com, on Facebook or on Twitter.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 7, 2018.