Hereditary (2018) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Horror | Mystery | Thriller

Tagline: Evil runs in the family.

When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter's 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.

Storyline: When the matriarch of the Graham family passes away, her daughter's family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, September 3, 2018 Hereditary's closing credits mention that it was shot in Utah, and according to online data at such sites as IMDb (and others), that locale is further specified as being in and around Salt Lake City. Though it's really not germane to the story the film tells, the Utah location perhaps "perked up" my personal ears for a couple of reasons. Having been born and raised in Salt Lake City, and probably due to the fact that I was a non-LDS being reared in a culture that was decidedly very Mormon back in those days (I've heard from friends, including LDS friends, that it's considerably more ecumenical slash cosmopolitan nowadays), I found it kind of funny that a film about cults and demonic possession should have been filmed in a region renowned for hosting a religion that is both perceived as being vice free (in terms of supposed "sins" like smoking and/or drinking, not to mention devil worship), but that I've nonetheless actually heard other people claim is a cult itself (I'm not condoning such an analysis, merely reporting it). Kind of weirdly, I just stumbled upon this kind of fascinating tidbit from the Salt Lake area's relatively recent past, which would suggest that despite its often squeaky clean image, there's a roiling substratum of supposedly "nefarious" activity that has occurred in or near the valley that Brigham Young famously described as "the place" his pilgrims had been searching for in their trek across the American wilderness, a place that evidently has included all kinds of "cults" over the years.

There was a funny old Johnny Carson joke from long ago where he described flying into the Salt Lake airport and the stewardess announcing, "We're about to arrive in Salt Lake City, please set your watches back twenty years," but Hereditary may subliminally suggest that there's a somewhat "longer" timeline suffusing the region, one that reaches back into the dim mists of creation when certain angels decided they knew best and all hell literally broke loose. Hereditary is an unabashedly disturbing film, and while it ultimately gets to some rather grotesque depictions (more about which a bit later in this review), it's interesting to contrast this film's approach with another outing I just reviewed, the Stephen Biro opus The Song of Solomon. The Song of Solomon is another film about possession which (as I mentioned in our The Song of Solomon Blu-ray review) proffers a pull quote on its cover touting it as "better than The Exorcist" (as can be seen in the key art above this review, the Friedkin film is also cited in a pull quote on this release as well). The Song of Solomon makes no cinematic bones about the presence of evil taking over the mind, soul and body of a young woman named Mary, and the bulk of that film deals with increasingly gory aspects of both possession and exorcism, with the film beginning with an extremely graphic sequence documenting the suicide of Mary's father courtesy of a knife he wields. Hereditary on the other hand manages to develop an unabashedly spooky mood more out of hints than outright displays for at least the first half hour or so, as it documents the emotional roller coaster an artist named Annie Graham (an impressive Toni Collette) experiences after first the death of her perhaps mentally ill mother and then somewhat later another tragic demise that tips Annie and her family into a fraught dynamic where the "veil" between reality and perhaps imagined fears is, to purloin a phrase also from long ago, rent asunder.

Note: At least one salient plot point needs to be discussed in any attempt to talk about Hereditary, a plot point which probably verges on spoiler territory, despite the fact that many if not most writings I've personally read about the film mentions it without any warning. I'll do the kind thing, and offer those wanting a revelation free (so to speak) first viewing experience the chance to skip down to the technical portions of the review, below, in order to avoid any unwanted disclosures.

Kind of interestingly, Hereditary starts with some printed text offering the obituary of Annie's mother, before moving on to Annie's family preparing to go to the funeral. Annie delivers a kind of halting eulogy, where she admits she was estranged from her mother, and that her mother was extremely secretive for most of her life. Already there are hints of dysfunctional shadows in these opening moments, with a kind of emotional disconnect between Annie and her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), son Peter (Alex Wolff) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Charlie seems especially unusual, prone toward tics and weird clicking sounds she makes with her tongue, and also highly invested in her little sketchbook she carries with her everywhere, to which she adds some rather bizarre illustrations even during the service in remembrance of her grandmother. This particular sequence ends with a kind of ham handed foreshadowing when Charlie is seen eating a chocolate bar and her parents question her as to whether it contains nuts.

A number of kind of outré elements accrue around the basic unsettling feeling the film offers, including the fact that Annie is evidently a famous "miniature" artist, crafting little cities in her workshop which have apparently made her something of a celebrity. This particular plot point is interesting, if not exactly explicatory of anything. One might think that Annie's "recreations" are an attempt to maintain control in some kind of environment, especially as things spiral toward chaos in her real life, but it's salient to note she actually spends quite a bit of time revisiting in miniature form a central tragedy the film presents, which may suggest a more mundane perspective that her artwork is simply therapy for her increasingly rattled state.

While there are some spooky moments early on where Annie is convinced she's seen her mother's spirit (something the film offers to the viewer as well, making any ambiguity kind of a dicey prospect), as well as a box full of memorabilia her mother left her, things really kick into true horror mode a bit after the half hour mark, when Annie insists that Charlie accompany Peter to a party the boy is going to. As he's in a bedroom getting stoned, Charlie munches on food that obviously contains nuts, leading to her going into anaphylactic shock. In a panic, Charlie zooms off with her on a foggy rural road to try to get to the nearest hospital. In a sequence which is initially played rather discursively, and is all the more devastating as a result, Charlie, trying desperately to get air, sticks her head out of the back window just at the moment Peter needs to swerve to avoid a dead animal in the road. A shoulder hugging telephone or power pole is seen hurtling toward Charlie's head, and the viewer is left to visualize what has happened.

In another rather fascinating bit of presentational style, Peter, obviously in shock, simply drives home and crawls into bed. The camera stays fixed on him as the next day dawns and Annie goes to the car to drive to an errand. Her out of frame screams ably document what horrors she found in the back seat of the car, at which point Hereditary offers its first real scene of carnage (after a brief earlier vignette showing Charlie cutting the head off of a dead bird, something that the camera doesn't really dwell on), an "up close and personal" look at Charlie's decapitated head lying on the pavement and covered with flies. Whether this is "real" or simply Peter's imagination isn't really made clear, but the end result is the same — it's easily one of the most disturbing moments the film offers.

Annie is obviously incredibly distraught over this development, and she makes a halting attempt to return to a grief support group she had visited earlier after her mom's death. She's approached by a woman named Joan (Ann Dowd), who attempts to offer a shoulder for Annie to cry on. The two develop a relationship built around the devastating loss of a child (or grandchild, in Joan's case), but, later, Joan kind of conspiratorially tells Annie that she's gone to a seance and has contacted her dead grandchild. Joan gives Annie instructions on how to do the same ritual in order to contact Charlie.

All of this plays out with the family dynamics unraveling in the wake of Charlie's horrifying death, something that Peter obviously feels responsible for, and which Annie, in an emotionally overwrought family dinner, more or less blames him outright for. Peter is also experiencing paranormal phenomena like seeing Charlie's apparition and repeatedly hearing her tongue clicking. Meanwhile, Annie becomes convinced she's opened some kind of portal to nether regions with her incantations to start the seance, a fear which is increased with the one two punch of Joan suddenly disappearing, and then the frightening discovery Annie makes in her mother's scrapbook that Joan had a long history with her family and may not have just been an "innocent" fellow griever at the support group.

Hereditary is really strong on mood, but I'm not quite sure the film's internal logic really holds up to any serious inquiry. There are hints that Annie's family was "chosen" long ago by the cult at the center of the film, but even this element isn't explained properly or developed in any real way. That tends to make the proceedings play a bit more like Rosemary's Baby, with a befuddled heroine finding herself enmeshed in a conspiracy that has ensnared her in an almost random fashion. The film's continued emphasis on headless beings is also kind of odd and I personally was never quite sure what writer-director Ari Aster was aiming for with this particular aspect. And why exactly is the family tree house such a "shrine"? All of this said, Hereditary is undeniably unsettling, anchored by a fully committed performance by Collette, who brings all of Annie's neurotic tendencies fully alive, something that arguably might have been played up even more to arrive at a spot where the viewer might not be quite sure as to whether what is being depicted is actually happening, or simply a delusion of Annie's addled mind. Hereditary is therefore almost too literal for its own good at times.

I'm not completely sure Hereditary is quite the modern classic some others seem to have felt it is, but the film has an undeniably effective mood which helps it elide some of its lack of development and in fact logic. Collette is excellent in a role that might have devolved into needless histrionics with a less nuanced performer, and the supporting cast, notably Wolff as son Peter, is also excellent. Technical merits are solid, and Hereditary comes Recommended.

[CSW] -1.2- This is a psychological horror thriller that is supposed to builds up steam like a runaway train. But to do that one must become heavily invested in the characters. Unfortunately I was never able to make that connection. So I was waiting for the plot to take over and bring me around, but it never did. It was far too weak a plot to hold this film together unless you heavily cared about the characters. It is primarily a tale of mental dissolve as Annie slowly implodes. Since I never developed any real caring for any of the characters Annie's implosion didn't get the desired reaction. Sadly and unforgivably Hereditary did not know what it wanted to be, so it just decided to be awful. There's a nagging shallowness to this film that prevents greatness, and a higher rating from me.
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This is a long and detailed explanation with some shocking scenes bolded.
-- Annie's family has a history of mental illness. Her father stopped eating and died of starvation, her brother died by suicide (claiming that his mother had tried to "put people in him") and her mother suffered dementia toward the end of her life. Searching through her mother's books on the occult, Annie finds a note that says, "Our sacrifices will pale next to the rewards."
-- At school, Peter is studying Greek tragedies, including that of Iphigenia – the princess whose father sacrificed her to the gods in return for strong winds on the journey to Troy. In class, the debate is whether it's more tragic if a character causes their own downfall due to a fatal flaw, or if it's worse if their downfall was fated all along and the characters have no control of their own fate at all.
-- Forced to take his sister to a party against both their wills, things go very wrong when Charlie has an allergic reaction to nuts in a chocolate cake. Racing to the hospital in the car, Charlie sticks her head out of the window in an attempt to ease her breathing, and is decapitated by a wooden post.
-- The post bears the same symbol that is on the necklace Annie's mother gave her (and continues to crop up throughout the film). An internet search identifies it as the 'Seal of Paimon' from the real-life 'spell book' The Lesser Key of Solomon.
-- Struggling with the loss, Annie considers returning to the bereavement group she visited after her mother's death. Parked in the car outside, unsure of whether to enter, she encounters a (seemingly) friendly woman called Joan (Ann Dowd). They bond, and after another chance encounter, Joan takes Annie home and conducts a séance in which she seems to contact her dead grandson.
-- Convinced by the spooky event, Annie ropes her family into conducting another séance with her to contact Charlie. Big mistake. They become the targets of a haunting that seems to focus on Peter. Charlie's notebook fills up with drawings of her brother with his eyes scratched out. Peter is followed by the light that Charlie saw. He sees his own reflection smirking at him, and later starts making the popping sounds that his sister was known for and smashing his face into his desk.
-- Annie attempts to stop the haunting, but her attempts fail. She finds in her mother's old books references to a demon called Paimon (there's that name again) who prefers to inhabit vulnerable male bodies, and the incredible rewards that the demon's conjuror will receive.
-- She also discovers photographs of Joan with her mother. Following flies coming out of the attic, she finds a headless body and the now-familiar symbol painted on the wall. After her husband Steve is immolated (burned up) thanks to the curse, a strange change overtakes Annie.
-- Peter wakes up in his bed at night after his head-banging incident. A possessed Annie creeps around the ceiling as he moves through the house and stumbles across the blackened body of his father. The house is full of naked strangers and he flees his mother into the attic, but finds her there sawing at her neck. Peter plunges out the window, and the strange light moves on to his back and disappears.
-- He wakes up and moves, as if in a dream, up into the nearby treehouse where the naked people dance around the decapitated, kneeling bodies of his mother and grandmother. They crown him, and Joan declares that he is Paimon, "one of the eight kings of hell". They have "corrected [his] female body" and now he can rule them. Peter stares blankly as the movie ends.

So what happened? It's clear that Annie's mother was part of a cult attempting to grant Paimon a body in return for wealth and/or power. Charlie was possessed by him while the cult worked on preparing Peter's body – the male body that he prefers to inhabit. Indeed, Charlie was Paimon from the very beginning. "From the moment she's born," Aster told Variety. "I mean, there's a girl that was displaced, but she was displaced from the very beginning." The appearance of the symbol on the post that killed Charlie indicates that her death was meticulously planned, as was Joan's 'chance' encounter and befriending of Annie to trick her into beginning the final spell.



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