Hereditary horror hype is justified
Print Edition
IN Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, was a midnight sensation at Sundance and ever since has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying you have to see it, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
“Hereditary” might be littered with horror clichés — candle-lit séances, creepy attics, satanic symbols, dogs that know something’s up — but the frightful power of it comes less from its framework than the exactitude of its Greek tragedy tale.
It begins with a succinct three-paragraph newspaper obituary. The 78-year-old mother of Annie has died, and her sudden absence from their mountain home has an eerie feeling
The mother’s passing is complicated. When Annie joins the support group, in a rush, explains how her mother was manipulative and that she wouldn’t let her near their first son, Peter (Alex Wolff), but, out of guilt, allowed her to grow close with their now troubled 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Dementia, psychosis, suicide and multiple personality disorder are all in the family history, she says.
“She was a very difficult woman,” says Annie. “Which maybe explains me.”
The mother may be dead, but she still controls her daughter’s life from beyond the grave.
Aster, who also wrote the film, fills his movie with foreshadowing clues that give events to come a cruel note of inevitability. There’s a curse on this family, whether by ghost or DNA.
They’re a vividly drawn family. Charlie sleeps in a treehouse amid birch trees, has a perilous nut allergy and makes ghoulish arts-and-crafts projects. When a bird flies into her classroom window, she scissors its head off and puts it in her pocket.
Peter is more apparently normal: a shaggy-haired stoner with a crush on a pretty girl. Wolff is very good in the part, growing increasingly panicked as the family demons he has tried to ignore, consume him.
Byrne is, as ever, a figure of reason, resistant to his wife’s ever rising paranoia. But this is, overwhelmingly, Collette’s film. Much of the supernatural flights of “Hereditary” might not have come off without such a formidable actress grounding it. There are other actors who could capture the overwhelming grief and disintegration of Annie, but there might not be another who could also do it with flashes of sarcasm and fury and exasperation.
Taking cues from Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” and Nicholas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now,” “Hereditary” asks whether Annie’s mother is a supernatural force or is she conjuring her own insanity?
The movie loosens its grip on you as it wobbles toward an ending that trades ruthless family dramatics for a more genre-typical occult conclusion. But it’s the first time that you can breathe and relax: Oh, right. It’s just a movie.
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