Hereditary (2018)

Hereditary (2018)

Written and Directed by Ari Aster

Rated R

           Except for a small handful of films, I can’t say that I am a real fan of the horror genre. I have never really been scared or even all that unsettled by a lot of the horror movies that have been released in theaters or direct to video. I enjoy horror when it is combined with other genres. Sci-fi/horror, action/horror, comedic horror genres entertain me more than if it was just a film that is just trying to deliver grueling terror. Movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing, Evil Dead II,  Army of Darkness and a few others are ones that I do enjoy and manage to mix different genres to make the horror elements more interesting.

           That’s not to say that straight up scary films don’t have their merits. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is a more that successfully freaked me out when I first saw it and a second viewing still managed to unsettle me and it managed to do so with almost no blood or gore. But in the long run it is a movie that I admire but don’t love so I will never own a copy. I don’t mean to say that I will never give straight horror a chance as there may very well be the possibility that one may catch my attention or even win my admiration. Hereditary didn’t do that. It is quite possibly one of the most tensionless, silliest and un-scary horror films I’ve seen in quite a long time.

Hereditary Trailer 1 (2018) Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne Horror Movie HD [Official Trailer]

           Annie (Toni Colette) is a creator of miniatures and is still dealing with the death of her mother. Her mother, a strange and secretive person, seems to have been the primary caregiver of her daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Charlie is not a normal child at all. She apparently never cried at all as a baby, hardly speaks to anyone, doesn’t trust her mother to raise her, she likes to draw and craft creepy things (she chops the head off a dead pigeon to apply it to a sculpture she is making) and she sleeps primarily in the tree house.  When Charlie is accidently killed when she is out with her brother Peter (Alex Wolff) at a party, Annie begins her descent into madness which is reflected in some of the miniatures that she creates and begins to cause much distress to her son and her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne). When Annie meets a person that helps her perform a séance that will help her contact Charlie, all hell begins to break loose and Annie and her family are now in danger.

           The first thing that I can say in this movie’s favor is that Toni Collette is convincing as a woman slowly losing her mind. From her quiet moments to her angry outbursts, she is simply fantastic here. I don’t know if this will win her a ton of accolades come award season, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she got a ton of them. All the other actors in the film are fine and do a good job with what they are given but they were all pretty much overshadowed by Collette. And the movie is competently made. As much as I dislike the film I admit that there are a few effective individual scenes (such as when you hear Annie scream when she discovers Charlie’s body and the camera is focused solely on Peter’s face which is frozen is shock), great practical and make up effects and unique camera work that helps deliver some of the very few scenes of genuine tension that occurs in the film.

            And that is all I can say about the things that I liked about the film because storytelling wise, as I alluded to above, is not as unsettling, frightening or even as involving as the press made it out to be. For starters, I didn’t think any of the characters were worth following. It's not always necessary in horror to like or fully see yourselves in the shoes of the characters featured as in a lot of cases they mostly seem to serve as vessel to move the horror story forward. Granted in Hereditary it goes beyond the 2-dimensional characters that commonly populate horror films and seems to develop its characters. I did find it interesting that Annie’s family seems to have a history of mental illness and when she begins to break down it is reflected in her miniatures. I thought that it was moving in the direction that the family was slowly beginning to lose their minds and that would make the family and by extension the audience unsure of what was going on. I thought madness would have been the titular “hereditary” trait that is passed down the family.  But when you find out what the film is building to, that is more in the direction of witchcraft and other crap, it becomes laughable and makes the whole experience completely not worth it.

            This is one of horror films that is a slow burn and that is normally something I would be grateful for if the payoff at the end makes it all worth it. Unlike last year’s It Comes at Night, things happen in this film and it has a payoff but unfortunately the payoff and all the events that lead up to it in roughly the last 45 minutes are absurd and at times hilarious. The film keeps things very mysterious and very slowly builds things up for roughly the first hour and a half but in the last third it dumps reveal upon reveal continuously on the audience on top of crazy macabre imagery. Since I knew where the story was going to go by the time some of the foreshadowed bits of dialogue and images came to fruition, I stopped paying attention to the what was going on in the narrative and began laughing at the movie. Seriously, all the moments that were supposed to be scary or at the very least make the audience uneasy made me and several members of the audience I viewed the movie with chuckle and made me wonder if I was watching the same film that the press was calling terrifying.

           As far as I’m concerned, this is a horror film that is trying way too hard to be artful and scary and fails spectacularly to deliver on both fronts. I’m not saying that horror movies can’t rise to the level of art but whenever any movie regardless of genre tries too hard to be artsy the result is kind of embarrassing to watch. Apart from the unintentionally funny moments, it fails as entertainment. As a supposed horror film, it fails to deliver a genuine scare or unsettling moment. Also, for a movie that is supposedly “god’s gift to modern horror”, it sure is using the cliché of children being an unholy vessel of evil and what not as well as several other things we have seen repeated over and over for the past 4 decades or so.

Groundbreaking indeed.

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