“Hereditary” Leaves Much to be Desired

Seemingly the most anxiously awaited movie of Summer ’18, Hereditary is writer and director Ari Aster’s debut into the full-length feature world. For months, audiences were promised a film that would redefine the horror genre and add new dimensions to what we thought we knew about what frightens us. However, what was actually delivered was lackluster at best, and gut-wrenchingly horrific at worst – and not in a good way. The film’s first 50 minutes are a hauntingly beautiful take on a woman tormented by grief, an image of mental health flirting with the paranormal. This is probably the most frustrating aspect of Hereditary as a whole: it begins so promisingly.

Protagonist Annie Graham (Toni Collette), as well as husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and teenaged children Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro) have just finished burying Annie’s mother when the film kicks off. It is shown early on that Annie and her mother did not have the greatest of relationships, but that her mother took quite an interest in Annie’s daughter, Charlie, when she was a baby. After her grandmother dies, Charlie shocks her mother by asking who will take care of her now that her grandmother is gone, amplifying the grief that Annie already feels over the ordeal. She devotes herself fully to her work creating miniatures (although these do seem to mirror Annie’s life events and inner struggles, they have almost nothing to do with the movie as a whole, and could have been explored better), possibly as a way to document her life and keep her sanity intact. However, Annie and Charlie soon begin to have strange experiences regarding the late grandmother, ranging from strange lights dancing about the room to full-fledged apparitions in the night. The rest of the family also has their own struggles, including an incident where an unknown force makes Peter slam his head into his desk at school and causes him to collapse into a fit of screams. As the family struggles to return to their normal lives, another tragic event strikes (in arguably the most horrifying scene in the entire movie. If you are uncomfortable with body horror, be sure to shut your eyes for this one). Torn apart by misery, Annie is driven to grief counseling, where she stumbles upon a woman named Joan (Ann Dowd) who just happens to be an “old friend” of Annie’s mother. Joan seems normal enough, until she advises Annie that she can conduct a séance to contact her deceased loved ones, complete with a tense demonstration. So, like any grieving person might do, she tries it herself.

This, unfortunately, is where the unique and evocative narrative we have been given thus far fades away into jump scares and horror clichés, which feel familiar as well as forced. Aster seems to discard the development of the characters that he has created in favor of  crawling on the walls, possessions, more bodily horror (sometimes quite graphic), and just plain cheesy elements that tend to separate the classics from common, low-brow horror. Part of the problem here is that the first-time director is jumping off the high-dive before he learns how to swim, trying to create a genre-breaking insta-classic in his debut film. Eager to please his audience, Aster abandons the intricate web of a plot that was delicately weaved throughout the first half of the movie, instead trying to make the audience “jump out of their seats”, as was promised in the hype prior to the movie’s release. Combined with slow pacing – the movie lands above 2 hours long, while most settle out around 90 minutes – Hereditary is less scary than it is uncomfortable and weird.

There are some things that Hereditary does quite well, which just makes it even more disappointing when it falls flat at the end. Visually, the film is amazing: dark lighting creates a dismal, creepy vibe throughout, coupled with uncomfortable close-ups and interesting angles. Collette plays the role of the agonizing, grief-riddled mother terrifically, and Shapiro creates a sense of creepy innocence that is extremely impressive for such a young actress with no prior film experience. The soundtrack by Colin Stetson seems reminiscent of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, avant-garde and terrifically unsettling. Despite everything that Hereditary gets right, it’s definitely the lack of a developed plot and unfaithfulness to the originality of the film’s beginning that really leaves something to be desired.

Hereditary sets up an intense, stirring, and chilling scene to start, but the way that this fades during the movie’s second half is quite unfortunate. Considering that this is Ari Aster’s first film, his effort is duly noted, commendable even. I can only hope that his next film can take everything that was good about this film, and leave the predictable tropes behind.