Hereditary (2018)

* spoilers *

Annie Graham is not very sad when her mother dies. They always had a rough relationship and became estranged before she succumbed to dementia and other ailments. At the funeral, a surprising amount of strangers attend along with Annie's daughter Charlie, her son Peter, and her husband Steve. They all go on with their lives while Annie feels unresolved about her chaotic childhood rife with family deaths and mental illness. Then, the family experiences a new tragedy that begins the unraveling of their lives.

Hereditary has some wonderful individual scenes that hit extremely hard. The first hour or so of the film is memorable, uniqely filmed, and well done. It establishes the Graham family and their relationships with each other. Annie is an intense woman who creates miniature art. She dotes over Charlie, her daughter who constantly draws and makes figures out of found objects. Peter, Charlie's older brother, seems have girls and pot on his mind at all times. There is an awkward tension between Annie and Peter that could be normal teenager-parent conflict. Steve is on the periphery, but has positive relationships with everyone. The focus is on Annie as she attends a grief support group and reveals her sordid family history full of mental illness, suicide, and abuse. When she befriends a woman from this group named Joan, she later reveals a horrifying incident where she covered herself, Peter, and Charlie in paint thinner and lit a match while sleepwalking. This incident is the most telling as to why Peter and Annie don't get along.

Then a devastating accident tears their family apart. Charlie is killed due to a chain of events involving allergies, nuts, and a dead animal in the road. This scene blew my mind. We don't really see what happens, but we see Charlie hang out of the car, the approaching telephone pole, and the oppressive silence that follows. The car had been loud with her wheezing, trying to breathe around her swelling throat. After that, the camera focuses only on Peter as he goes through a number of emotions on his face: shock, hope, realization, sadness, and finally a numb calm. He drives home without looking in the back seat, parks as usual, and goes to bed only to lay there awake for hours. This scene had so much emotion. The carnage isn't seen there, but we know something terrible happened. The dread built over the night when he lay there is like a crazy amped up version of dreading your parents are going to find something you did when they wake up. I couldn't believe it was happening. The tension and dread didn't let me look away from the screen.

The aftermath is equally devastating. Annie is inconsolable, screaming and crying for hours. Peter is numb and doesn't seem to say anything or react. They collide during dinner one night when Annie explodes, claiming that Peter didn't take responsibility for his actions and that she hates him and his disdain. This seems to be the first time Charlie's death was discussed as a family, showing that their norm is not to communicate at all until it becomes a fight. A dream sequence also shows her revealing to Peter that she never wanted to be his mother and tried to miscarry him with a repeat of the paint thinner incident. These two scenes in particular show Annie's tendency to lash out and continue the cycle of abuse started by her mother. She also has built up resentment over Peter's very reasonable feelings of fear and distrust towards her. Instead of working through them or being honest in a constructive, nonaggressive way, she opts to hold grudges and leave all of it unsaid. Even with her husband, Annie chooses to keep even her need for support a secret and leaves room for doubt since she has been lying. Her only outlet for emotion is her miniature art where she constructs scenes from her life. Steve proves to be the most decent character of the film who offers emotional support without judgment or anger.

Unfortunately, I feel that the film falls apart after this. The seance scenes completely obliterate any tension or emotion that was built up. What follows is typical cult tropes that are scene in films from Rosemary's Baby to The Omen. Some of the horror elements are well done, but felt silly and compelely disconnected after the bombshell of Charlie's death. All of the truly shocking events were part of the family drama and not part of the supernatural aspects at all. While I enjoyed how all events were connected and essentially predestined, it also made the movie much more predictable, along with the tropes, so very few scenes were a surprise. Another thing that bothered me was how simple logistical things seemed to be ignored. Why did the family never have an epipen when Charlie was allergic to nuts? Why was Peter going to school so soon after his sister's death and why weren't people talking about it everywhere? Why wasn't he offered therapy? Why wasn't Annie's mother's whole deal a little more established so the ending made more sense? The last scene was a bit frustrating as well. If you need a whole exposition bomb right at the end of your movie, maybe you're doing something wrong.

Hereditary has some undeniably amazing scenes and masterful direction and acting. I wish the ending of the film would have had the same emotional weight as Charlie's death, but it seemed silly in comparison. The ending had too many typical horror tropes that cheapened it and made it predictable. A reveal about Charlie's character also made it quite ablist, implying that she is odd and/or disabled because of a possession. It left a bad taste in my mouth and yet another example of outdated, ignorant ideas still having a presence in modern day horror. I did enjoy all the performances, particularly Toni Collette as Annie, Alex Wolff as Peter, and Annie Dowd as Joan. Ari Aster has a unique vision as a director, but I found his writing not as impressive.

My rating: 3.5/5 fishmuffins