Hereditary review: Ari Aster’s flawed yet still powerful debut horror

US: 2018/ 127 mins/ Cert. 15

Director: Ari Aster

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd

Hereditary, described by Time Out as “a new generation’s The Exorcist” is one of the most-talked about new releases of recent months and has received considerable praise from critics. Overall the film is worthy of its acclaim, although the frequent comparison to The Exorcist arguably says more about the longevity and power of William Friedkin’s masterpiece than Ari Aster’s film itself. It is doubtful whether people will treat Hereditary with the same reverence as The Exorcist in 40 years’ time although this is not to say that the film will not be considered a minor classic in years to come. Hereditary contains some genuinely heart-stopping moments and from its opening seizes you with a sense of dread that barely lets you go for its duration.

Annie Graham (Toni Collette) lives in a secluded house on the edge of woodland with her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff) and thirteen-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Annie is an artist, specialising in building miniature models and figurines of the family, their home and environment, creating stunningly realistic tableaux vivants of the events which have impacted upon their lives. The film opens with a camera pan around Annie’s studio, settling on the miniature of Peter’s bedroom before a slow zoom into the room allows the “real” action to take over. The miniature models become an integral part of Hereditary’s mise en scène and an ingenious device for reflecting the film’s atmosphere and narrative themes. As the film progresses, the models create a defamiliarization effect which asks whether what we are seeing is real or merely a construct of Annie’s imagination? Or is there an external supernatural force exerting a malevolent control over the family?

The story begins after the death of Annie’s mother. During her funeral eulogy we discover that Ellen was a difficult and secretive woman and that the mother and daughter were estranged for much of their lives. Owing to the strained relationship with the grandmother, the entire family are struggling to grieve and only it is only Charlie who seems affected by the death. Charlie is a morbidly obsessed and lonely child who snips the head off dead pigeons to assemble bizarre toys, asking her mother after the funeral “who will look after me when you die?” Shapiro captures the weirdly-creepy young child horror trope perfectly.

The first act of Hereditary builds a foreboding atmosphere which is genuinely disquieting, revealing the family’s troubles and hinting that something dreadful is lurking in its past. We discover that Annie’s family has a history of mental illness and that her brother suffered from schizophrenia and committed suicide as a teenager, blaming Ellen for “trying to put people inside him.” Later we discover Annie has a history of sleepwalking and during one episode narrowly escaped burning Peter and herself alive with paint thinner and matches. Both Annie and Charlie are haunted by sightings of the dead grandmother.

About a third of the way into the film, a brutal and tragic event occurs which is so brilliantly executed and unexpectedly shocking that it violently jolts you from your seat. Frustratingly, there follows a shift in tone with the film increasingly coming to rely upon more familiar horror generic devices which make the latter part of Hereditary suffer in comparison to the earlier section. However, even though Hereditary doesn’t quite recapture its early momentum, there are still enough memorable images towards the end which linger horribly in the mind and, despite its flaws, there is still a lot to be admired in the film. Aster’s preference for long takes and slow camera movement helps to ratchet up an unbearable feeling of anxiety and the leading players are all excellent, especially Collette, who surely ought to receive recognition for her outstanding performance when awards season rolls around.

In its depiction of the destructive nature of grief, Hereditary thematically and visually echoes Nic Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, with nods to Roeg’s masterpiece in the red smock which is worn by Charlie and the introduction of a spiritualist-dabbling, Joan (Ann Dowd), who befriends Annie at the bereavement therapy class. There is also an image of spilled paint, a subtle reference to similar images reprised throughout Don’t Look Now. In addition, Hereditary’s themes are comparable to the modern horror classic The Babadook but without the sustained psychological intensity of Jennifer Kent’s superior film and Robert Eggers’ The Witch, made by A24, the same company that produced Hereditary. For all the lazy comparisons to The Exorcist, the film Hereditary has most in common with is Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby perhaps with a dash of Hammer’s The Devil Rides Out and even The Wicker Man added to the mix.

Aster has claimed that whilst the film can be read as a metaphor for madness and a comment upon the destructiveness of guilt, the film’s ending should be taken literally. The problem is that if you read a horror genre text like Hereditary too literally, there is always the danger that the narrative will fall apart and the plot-holes become as wide and cavernous as the portal into Hell itself. The final act of the film abandons the nuanced psychological approach and loses some of its impact although the fact that it doesn’t completely revert to standard horror jump-scare clichés is commendable. Overall, the film could have been improved with a little more editing (Aster has revealed that the first cut ran at a total of three hours), cutting out some unnecessary exposition to allow for more ambiguity as Hereditary is at its best, and most terrifying, when operating in the hinterlands of the unconscious; the nightmarish territory between reality and fantasy.

Perhaps not quite the classic, nor as scary, that some have claimed, Hereditary is still an unsettling and effective horror which shows a great deal of promise for its first-time director.