Directed by Ari Aster

Starring – Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff

The Plot – When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s (Collette) family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited. Making his feature debut, writer-director Ari Aster unleashes a nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown that exhibits the craft and precision of a nascent auteur, transforming a familial tragedy into something ominous and deeply disquieting, and pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain with its shattering portrait of heritage gone to hell.

Rated R for horror violence, disturbing images, language, drug use and brief graphic nudity

POSITIVES

– First things first, if you’re expecting a typical modern day horror film, be warned against it. Hereditary instead puts tension above cheap jump scares that have become all the typical, ranking a refreshingly gloom-and-doom backdrop to compliment the setting stage that is as thick as fog.

– When watching the film, you sometimes see supernatural things happening in the air despite the fact that this film is anything about entities or ghosts. The reason for this is because you are being forced to watch Hereditary from a mentally disturbed person’s point-of-view. Keep that in mind when you watch the film, because much of what you’re seeing is being seen from a particular character’s frame and not so much the audience at home who are looking at what’s happening with blinding goggles of their own.

– In addition to the concepts of wrapping your mind around the things you’re seeing, the sound mixing design is impeccable to say the least. There were many times during the movie where I myself questioned whether or not the things I was hearing were legitimately there, and Linzy Elliot’s manipulation of casual conversation dialogue certainly cast extra emphasis on the unnerving atmosphere that Lester as a director has perfected in his latest.

– Toni Collette overwhelms for two hours of dominant screenplay. Collette has always been an actress who provides an outstanding amount of range with her visual transformations for the role, and this is certainly no exception. Through the many stages of grief and what feels like never-ending stress, Collette takes us on a bumpy coaster of emotional distress that never relents even for a second.

– The shadow work and natural lighting as well, touched an artistic nerve with the art fiend from within. Besides the storyboard miniature art pieces that Collette’s character adorns throughout the film, there is also great care taken with the pursuing of the tricks that your eyes play on you in the dark. Many times during the film, a person or a vital object to the plot can be seen in the corner of the film, bringing a marriage of exceptional framing and ominous lighting that eludes to the audience long before it does the characters within its own movie.

– Much of the family confrontations feel honest in an appreciative kind of way, because of the authenticity of their sheer confrontations when playing against the increase in volume. Most films stumble on this concept by reaching for the dagger blow far too early in the sequence, but Lester as a screenwriter puts enough confidence in his reactive dialogue that reaches for the crowning knockout at the right particular moment.

– Exceptional camera work all around that feeds into A24’s continued presence on horror. Some of my personal favorite touches involved the panning movements that follow a character when they look in a certain direction, the long-winded group meeting sequences that slowly bring Collette front-and-center with our attention, and of course the endless spinning from upside down to downside up when it feels like the crescendo of tension just can’t maximize any further.

NEGATIVES

– While I had zero problems with the pacing of the film, despite the fact that it could afford to lose fifteen minutes or so, a pacing issue I did have revolved with Lester’s script. Midway through the film, a cult subplot is introduced and tends to take up more time than I was hoping when colliding with the family disease plot that was promised in advertising. The link between them is eventually tied up, but it’s within the final twenty minutes that this overload of information is unleashed at us, instead of being paced across the more-than-generous 122 minutes that the film was given.

– Nothing personal to actor Alex Wolff, and I know the role called for him to be childish of sorts in his relationships with his parents, but he stole charm from sequences and completely unglued my immersion in the film every time his character was asked to cry. There is no shortage of this horribly nasal whining throughout the movie, and surely Aster understood how these instances would leave people with unintentional laughter.

– Despite the unnerving presence that is second to none with Lester’s work here, I never really found the movie anywhere near as terrifying as I did educational. I say educational because of the mentality behind someone with mental sickness. But the scares in the film were rarely ever anything above a momentary wince at the sometimes nerve-shattering visuals that I was being presented. I can understand that an out-of-context theme like a film’s trailer will move people more because of what’s being incorporated with those visuals, but on there own I was able to watch Hereditary without ever feeling the paranoia of this family falling apart.

7/10