Movie Review: HEREDITARY (2018)

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Man, where to start.

One of the most highly-rated and most talked about horror-films of 2018, HEREDITARY features what ends up being the complete and utter disintegration of a family that is already hanging on more-or-less by its emotional fingernails. And, in the process, first-time director Ari Aster knocks it out of the fucking park with his first at-bat.

The film features the Graham Family, who is dealing with the passing of grandmother Ellen, and the resulting emotional fallout. Ellen was a mercurial, difficult woman, who has been living with her daughter's family for the past several years as her condition had deteriorated. Daughter Annie (played by the absolutely magnificent Toni Collette), her children Charlie, and Peter, and her husband, Steve, all deal with this in various ways. Steve takes care of the financial aspects, while Annie comes to terms with her deeply complicated feelings about her mother. 13-year old Charlie seems somewhat disconnected from the events and exhibits several disturbing behaviors, and 16-year old Peter more-or-less just wants to get back to hanging out with his friends after-school and smoking pot.

We learn early on that this is a very dysfunctional family, and Annie is fighting to keep it together. She comes off as somewhat detached herself, but the truth is that she's barely coping, and uses her work with meticulously-crafted miniatures as therapy. Annie has a very troubled past in regards to her mother, and as the events progress, she learns that her mother has left them all a very bitter, conspiratorial legacy that threatens to swallow them all whole, and puts one in the mind of Roman Polanski's incredible ROSEMARY'S BABY.

This film is something of a slow-burn at the start, but even when its progressing, the pace never feels glacial, because its peppered with odd bits and pieces and events here and there that make you question what's going on. Guided by the absolutely masterful score by Colin Stetson, HEREDITARY presses on, keeping the viewer's attention as it proceeds to completely subvert your expectations at the close of the first act with a gut-wrenching sequence of events designed to completely upend any assumptions you've made to that point. Once that happens, the film has its hooks in you as it builds and builds, putting on the pressure, until its unsettling climax.

At home, we have the advantage of skipping back if we missed something, but evidently this was one hell of a group experience if you saw it in the theaters, and I wish now that I'd been able to do that. Even so, the film remains surprising, shocking, and powerful, and it will almost certainly stick with you lomg after the credits roll. Its also a film that absolutely benefits from an extra viewing or two, and I intend to go back and re-watch it later on. Its probably the most powerful film I've watched during this marathon, with only INSIDE coming close. Oh, and also, Toni Collette should have gotten an Oscar nomination, and she was totally fucking robbed. Its just another example of how the academy awards have become a steaming pile of utter bullshit.

There is no way I could give this amazing example of cinema anything less than FIVE stars, and it gets my highest possible recommendation.


*****

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