Ari Aster works with incalculable human misery—the kind of horrible tragedies and situations you never want to think about because there's literally no possible way to deal with them if they do. There's a fun speculative idea of "wouldn't it be fucked if [X] happened?" and then there's Ari Aster, asking the unbearable question of "how could you even remotely conceive of a life after this trauma?"
I love horror that can shake me. And maybe no other horror story has shaken me this badly.
Hereditary is a scary supernatural movie, but mostly it's a tragedy fueled by heavy, disturbing emotion. This is "good", because for 90 percent of the movie, there's no concrete indication of what the hell is going on.
Annie is an artist whose mother just died, leaving a fraught legacy. Annie's daughter Charlie is the only one who misses Grandma, and her son Peter is closed-off. As the family tries to move through the mourning, the worst thing ever happens and an attempt to turn to spiritualism in the wake of it seems to invoke malicious supernatural forces.
The acting in the film is very strong, with authentic dialogue and huge emotional ranges for a shattering grieving family. Toni Collette should have gotten an Oscar win for her role, which shows a mother utterly consumed by pain, grief, rage, and desperate terror as her life shatters under past and current traumas and she comes across a horrible truth. The horror is also great. It's slow-burning, lingering, or ambiguous...right until the full reveal becomes the most terrible and scary option. Much of the horror is from the drama, with a dreadful, foul detachment and isolation in the characters that lets every problem fester to its worst outcome. The hardest scene to watch isn't even a "horror movie scene". It's a sequence where a character's life becomes a walking nightmare through a plausible traumatic event and the rest of the family is traumatized by having to discover the event themselves unprepared. In this sequence and elsewhere, Aster masterfully commands the tone to make everything as harrowing and emotionally sickening as possible.
The plot's resolution may seem confusing or overly literal for a film about the fallout of a shocking tragedy. Seeing forces behind it might seem strange or reductive, but that's thematically relevant. In reality, such horrors are assumed to be truly random, but the film asks questions about whether that's actually true. Heck, some of the fully mundane problems mentioned in the film are literally hereditary, so even excluding fantasy machinations, how much horror really springs from nothing?
The film asks a striking question about tragedy—If we know it's inevitable, is it better or worse? In many ways, though, the film also wants us to evaluate inevitability—
Film One of the purest expressions of horror in cinema.
Ari Aster works with incalculable human misery—the kind of horrible tragedies and situations you never want to think about because there's literally no possible way to deal with them if they do. There's a fun speculative idea of "wouldn't it be fucked if [X] happened?" and then there's Ari Aster, asking the unbearable question of "how could you even remotely conceive of a life after this trauma?"
I love horror that can shake me. And maybe no other horror story has shaken me this badly.
Hereditary is a scary supernatural movie, but mostly it's a tragedy fueled by heavy, disturbing emotion. This is "good", because for 90 percent of the movie, there's no concrete indication of what the hell is going on.
Annie is an artist whose mother just died, leaving a fraught legacy. Annie's daughter Charlie is the only one who misses Grandma, and her son Peter is closed-off. As the family tries to move through the mourning, the worst thing ever happens and an attempt to turn to spiritualism in the wake of it seems to invoke malicious supernatural forces.
The acting in the film is very strong, with authentic dialogue and huge emotional ranges for a shattering grieving family. Toni Collette should have gotten an Oscar win for her role, which shows a mother utterly consumed by pain, grief, rage, and desperate terror as her life shatters under past and current traumas and she comes across a horrible truth. The horror is also great. It's slow-burning, lingering, or ambiguous...right until the full reveal becomes the most terrible and scary option. Much of the horror is from the drama, with a dreadful, foul detachment and isolation in the characters that lets every problem fester to its worst outcome. The hardest scene to watch isn't even a "horror movie scene". It's a sequence where a character's life becomes a walking nightmare through a plausible traumatic event and the rest of the family is traumatized by having to discover the event themselves unprepared. In this sequence and elsewhere, Aster masterfully commands the tone to make everything as harrowing and emotionally sickening as possible.
The plot's resolution may seem confusing or overly literal for a film about the fallout of a shocking tragedy. Seeing forces behind it might seem strange or reductive, but that's thematically relevant. In reality, such horrors are assumed to be truly random, but the film asks questions about whether that's actually true. Heck, some of the fully mundane problems mentioned in the film are literally hereditary, so even excluding fantasy machinations, how much horror really springs from nothing?
The film asks a striking question about tragedy—If we know it's inevitable, is it better or worse? In many ways, though, the film also wants us to evaluate inevitability—
What do we not realize is headed right for us?