Hereditary Review (Film, 2018) #31DaysofHorror
Hereditary poster, featuring the family standing with no smiles staring into middle distance.
There are times where I need to take a step back and remind myself how what we watch influences how we respond to films. What seems novel or innovative to someone who doesn’t watch a lot of horror can seem tired or even poorly done to someone who watches a lot of horror. Horror has the added element of the crowd mentality. When you see a horror film with a group of people, the reaction of a few can really influence how you respond to a film. It only takes a few live screams or seeing other people jump out of their seats for you to start to feel a similar sense of dread or even fear.
Hereditary is one of the latest horror films to gain a notorious reputation out of the Sundance Film Festival. Sundance always has a healthy horror programming block and the right combination of acting, style, and subject matter can really help make a small horror film a big hit. Many of the kooky critical darlings you’ve heard of had their US premieres at Sundance: Teeth, The Babadook, The Witch, Mandy, Revenge, It Follows, etc. Just as a general rule, this kind of Sundance horror tends to come in two molds: harrowing family horror or shocking concept with dark humor. Hereditary tries to straddle both without really committing to either concept.
Hereditary is a film about death, family, and obsession. It opens with a funeral. Annie’s mother Ellen has died. She was a stern, often cruel woman with multiple mental health problems. No one in Annie’s family is particularly sad that she died except for her daughter, Charlie. Charlie does not seem to have a strong connection with her own mother or anyone else in the family. No one in the family seems particularly connected. They live and eat together, but each retires to their own space as often as possible to work on their own obsession, and each obsession drives everyone else in the family to the breaking point.
Somewhere in Hereditary is a solid modern Gothic. Ari Aster’s debut feature is stuffed with concepts that could make for a good horror film. For example, Annie is a professional miniature artist. She creates autobiographical portraits of moments in her life in scale dioramas. Her latest collection for an upcoming gallery showing is about her family living with her mother’s dementia during the last weeks of her life. The film jumps back and forth before the hyper-realistic miniature tableaus and the increasingly bizarre circumstances following Ellen’s death. That in itself could be a terrifying horror film.
The dioramas in Hereditary are breathtaking. I’d watch an entire film about making these miniatures.
Aster doesn’t stop there. He doesn’t even pause to actually develop the idea. The miniatures are background noise in a film that never develops an actual focus. They are, at best, an allusion to his other favorite device, referencing Ancient Greek tragedy as shorthand for characters’ struggles in the film. The connections are never really developed, but the names are dropped to make you think there’s a clear parallel or some genuine significance. Hereditary is defined by excess and blatant references to far greater horror that came before. The result is a film that has no consistent voice, plot, emotional investment, or honesty at all.
The only consistency in the film is a sensation I can only describe as emotional blackmail. Aster does not work in good faith in this horror film. He is committed to his shocking moments—not scary, shocking—at the expense of developing characters or justifying anything that happens on film. It belies a lack of maturity as a filmmaker. Aster is so obsessed with how to include all these ideas that he never stops to ask if he should even include them. There are many moments throughout the film where he walks right past a terrifying concept and settles on something grotesque (but meaningless) just because of a visual gag.
The end of the first act takes a sick sense of pride in betraying one of the biggest taboos in horror. This particular taboo is one of the no-brainer things you never see experienced filmmakers or genuine horror fans pursue without actually justifying its inclusion. Films that toy with this do it to tertiary characters or place this kind of character in harm’s way but ultimately don’t end them just for the scare. If a story hinges on that scene, you rarely see the actual act of violence happen and the story itself earns that emotional moment.
Horror is, by its nature, a cruel genre. We’re watching people face terrifying, often violent circumstances that would be tragic front page news if they happened in the real world. We place our trust as filmgoers into the arms of the director. In return, we expect the director to act in good faith, present us with a story and characters that bring us in, and guide us through some really disturbing content in a way that still excites or entertains us. Good horror makes us scream; great horror makes us think.
Bad horror, however, tends to be made by people who put shock value above all else. The sequence that ends the first act of Hereditary is so cruel, manipulative, and excessive for what is needed to commit to this story that I immediately felt removed from everything else that happens. Aster actually had a beautifully subtle buildup for a far more tasteful and unnerving way to set up the rest of the story. Instead of committing to what is genuinely one of the most terrifying horror sequences I’ve ever seen, he adds in a needlessly violent and shocking twist to cap off the scene for a cheap jump scare. It’s lazy. It’s manipulative. It’s focused on a specific character to force the audience to care for a family that, frankly, is less defined as a group of characters than your average run of victims in a Friday the 13th film. Even if I had found that moment effective, I would quickly grow tired of blatant recreations of that image that appear in more scenes than not for the remaining runtime of the film.
I, too, studied the Great Depression in high school. Now explore why the chalkboard with multiple people’s handwriting and basic facts about it are significant enough to use as background noise in what’s supposed to be a scary scene. Or just say “depression” over and over and pretend it’s meaningful. That’s what Hereditary does in every school scene.
We learn nothing about the characters in the family beyond what happens to them or what they do. There is no exploration of emotion, thoughts, or philosophy unless it is forced upon them by outside influence. Annie makes miniatures and lies about going to grief counseling. Charlie pops her tongue and makes weird toys. Peter smokes weed everyday. And the father, Steve, says nothing of substance or importance for almost the entire film; I guess he’s a business man or something. Even the worst, most lifeless horror film about a family facing unimaginable pain and suffering will try to show any detail about their day to day life that makes them relatable; Hereditary doesn’t even try.
This is what I mean by emotional blackmail. Aster does not justify why we should care about these characters in this story. He wields death as a weapon against the audience to make us care. Losing a loved one is relatable, so we naturally empathize with the family right from the start. The characters and the plot lack any specificity as to why we should care about this family and this story specifically. Yes, a peanut allergy is terrifying. Sending your kids off to a high school party and worrying about if they’re going to drink and make stupid choices is terrifying. The risk of losing your job because you just can’t do all the work you need to do is terrifying. Your family family apart is terrifying.
Instead of actually leaning into any of these plot points with thought, emotion, specificity, or purpose, Aster has someone in the family mention them with indistinct dialogue a few times and never explores them in a meaningful way. If you find what happens in this film captivating or terrifying, it’s means you are associating your own outside knowledge of terrifying, bad, no good, horrible circumstances within the story. Hereditary itself does nothing but paint a pretty picture with no context, genuine emotion, or character development to justify actually caring about what happens for two hours.
Aster’s writing and direction is an exercise in bad faith. He doesn’t justify any of his big scares with writing or voice. He references something that might make you feel bad and then puts all of his effort into shocking you with grotesque visuals. For me, there is only one scene in the entire film—a tense family dinner—that has any narrative justification whatsoever for the horror presented. I would gladly watch a two hour film in that style. The characters are clear. The dialogue is both realistic and specific to actual things that have happened in the story so far. The horror is a natural extension of believable circumstances and doesn’t just include a shocking act of violence or visual as shorthand for scary. To me, this indicates that Aster could have taken this concept and done it in a way that was scary and memorable without exploiting the empathy of the audience.
Toni Collette is the MVP of this film. The family dinner is her Oscar scene if A24 can make a campaign stick.
There are things to praise in Hereditary. Toni Collette is phenomenal as Annie. I wish the screenplay gave her a clearer arc or a more consistent effort, but Collette manages to craft the only realistic and honest character in the entire film. What she goes through has weight and believability because she clearly did her homework and found a way to connect the dots between all the disparate distant scenes.
The supporting cast is uniformly excellent in spite of the lack of character development in the script. I buy the teenage angst of Milly Shapiro and Alex Wollf as Charlie and Peter, respectively. Gabriel Byrne really shines in the later scenes where he finally has anything to do beside speak calmly as the father. Ann Dowd, unsurprisingly, almost steals the entire film with a charming turn as a grandmother who befriends Annie at the group grief counseling class. The quality of acting makes me want to invest in a screenplay that really does nothing to make me care about their lives.
The miniatures in the film are stunning. Steve Newburn crafts a series of hyper realistic scale models of key locations to the film that have a greater impact than the actual settings themselves. I would almost believe in Hereditary and its storytelling approach if it actually was a stop motion horror film presented in the universe of those models. It’s quite clear that Aster is playing with the characters being props in a story they cannot define, but the elaborate dioramas Annie’s character creates throughout the film have a greater dynamic and sense of cinematic magic than the scenes that inspire them. The quality of the miniatures makes me wish they played a much larger role in the story than they do.
When I go into a film, I don’t want to hate it. I watch so many films and write about them because I love the medium. For me, a film like Hereditary takes close to a century of standards and limitations we’ve placed on what should or should not be included in narrative filmmaking and throws them away . There’s an old saying about having to know the rules to break the rules; Aster does not convince me he actually understands enough about horror to justify such a disconnected approach to what’s essentially an old-fashioned Gothic ghost story.
Opening a film with a funeral sets a tone. It’s up to the filmmaker to actually justify and expand on that tone in their film. Hereditary says “funerals are sad, feel bad for mourners, am I right?” and does nothing with it.
There are so many modern horror films that do brilliant things with a cold tone in horror and do not force the audience to do all the heavy lifting on making any actual emotional connection with the film—Noriko’s Dinner Table, Stoker, The Babadook, The Witch, The Killing of a Sacred Deer. I mention these specifically. There are moments in each of these stories that play around with horror taboos that don’t usually get crossed. Their screenplays, direction, and edits are so clear in their intent and honest in their approach to these concepts that they feel fair. Every film, to some extent, is manipulating its audience; the good ones do it in a way that guides the audience to these emotional reactions or intellectual connections in a way that feels natural and honest. Hereditary does neither.
I know people who honestly enjoyed Hereditary. I did not. I can only speak from my own experience. I’m not opposed to shocking horror—I’ve justified enthusiasm for The Human Centipede, The Collector/The Collection, the Saw series, and many others. I love emotional drama in horror, too—American Mary, 10 Cloverfield Lane, Suicide Club, and all those films in the last paragraph. What I cannot stay silent on are films that exploit the empathy of the audience. Its cinematic gaslighting. I’m not comfortable with films that try to convince you they achieve some grand effect when all they really do is force the audience to pull on their own memories and life experience to fill in a very rough draft. I can assign a grander meaning to a flip book, too, but it doesn’t mean that the illustrator did anything beyond connecting separate pictures into one scene. It’s technically impressive but ultimately meaningless without the audience doing all the hard work.
Hereditary is currently available to rent or purchase on all digital platforms.
Like what you’re reading? Consider supporting Sketchy Details today.
