Hereditary film review and analysis

Hereditary 

Hereditary, is a horror film that debuted in the Midnight category of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. Produced by A24, an indie company that emerged in 2013. First time writer and director Ari Aster, delivers a formally confident story within a detailed family dynamic, and thoughtfully conceived visual metaphors to reflect them. The horror erupts from the characters, their relationships, and sometimes the cruel behaviours towards one another. 

The setting is a large homes surrounded by acres of trees and grassy hills. Our story follows the Graham family living in what looks like total isolation coping with the recent death of Annie’s mother, Ellen, and from the beginning the family doesn’t seem close and loving whatsoever, each usually occupying a different room by themselves and when they are around each other it seems very stiff and awkward, almost as if they’ve been isolated an distant for quite some time, and this is only made even more apparent when confronting the loss of Annie’s mother.  Her son Peter is essentially numb, blankly going through the motions of trying to be a normal teenager, but it’s obviously still traumatised by a childhood experience were his mother almost set both of them on fire while sleep walking. Another very important character in this story is Annie’s daughter Charlie, who is a social pariah, preferring to cut the heads off of birds to use for bizarre twisted little sculptures and barely speaking beyond her strange mouth click. Her father Steve, who remains an outsider next to his artistically inclined wife and children. And finally Annie, the mother who already had mental issues of her own including the sleepwalking which only gets more severe after her mother’s death, Ellen, a woman who’s domineering presence and secrets had  tormented Annie for some time. After Charlie was born Annie’s mother insisted on breastfeeding her granddaughter herself, which meant that for Annie had always seen Charlie as her mother’s daughter, whereas her own relationship with Peter remains distant at best. The movie takes us from Annie’s perspective so we, the audience, only know as much as she does, making us remain as clueless as the characters. But there are a staggering number of clues to let us know that something strange is happening from the beginning, the first major instance being at Ellen’s funeral, as Annie delivers a eulogy, she notices that there are a lot of people in attendance she’s never seen before, our first indication of her mother’s unknown secret life. Unbeknownst to Annie, she and her family are targets of a ritual to bring about the resurrection of a god this cult worships, and the entire films events are being orchestrated and controlled by this group, a religious cult led by her mother referred to them as queen Leigh. This major theme of the strings being pulled by outside forces is illustrated by Annie’s dioramas she creates, depicting events and places from her life, and appears to be an attempt to feel control as well as process her emotions, but the reality is it is she and her family that are in their own doll house, and the outside force controlling them is the cult, they’re essentially sacrificial lambs oblivious to their greater purpose. The reason behind this appears tied to the family’s bloodline, which the title itself “Hereditary” clues us into, and potentially also refers to mental illness passing down through the families generations as well. Annie tries to impel her family members to believe what she’s seen. This leads to a familiar blend of horror tropes, expertly employed by Aster without the usual gimmickry: the eerie appearance of figures watching from a distance, spectral light, images associated with witchcraft, talk of demon possessions, and an attic with a disturbing secret. In my opinion the best scene in Hereditary is the car scene, and the prolonged aftermath, because it’s a perfectly grounded, non supernatural bit of drama, it’s realistic horror, the kind that can happen to any of us. The first reason is because of the way this scene builds tension. We start off in the script: ‘Peter speeds down the empty HIGHWAY, in the back seat Charlie GASPS and gurgles for breath, she KICKS at the door and GRASPS at her throat, tears of pain stream down her face’ The screen writer uses a simple but effective tool to create urgency in the description, by capitalising select words to accentuate the panic being felt in the car, the momentum escalates to its culmination. The second thing this scene does is it decides to maintain suspense by withholding a release, we stay close on Peter’s face, struggling to grasp at the situation, his eyes hardly blinking, the camera does not push or pull away, just like him, we are stuck in this moment, no words are said, we stay in silence. Our attention is forced on every minute detail of his reaction and we sit there marinating in the unresolved tension wondering: What’s going to happen next? His sight unlocks from the road and hovers slightly to the rear view mirror, for a second, but stops himself as soon as he sees a reflection, Peter limits our view and we are not allowed to have a release, it’s a realistic portrayal of a person in a state of extreme shock, confused and incapable of accepting what just happened. And that’s why i think this scene is so great, it evokes an emotion on the us the audience, and manages to make whoever’s watching it uncomfortable and unsure of what going to happen next, making us feel for the character almost for the first time in the movie since Peter hasn’t shown any type of harsh emotions until now. This movie has been incredibly anticipated leading up to its release, with critics declaring it the scariest movie since “The exorcist”, with sites such as MetaCritic giving it a score of an 87 and rotten tomatoes with a score of an 89%.