DON’T FORGET TO BRING ALONG THE DEFIBRILLATOR
Fright knight Ari Aster emerges as a stunning master of horror
HEREDITARY
★★★★★ out of five Cast: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro Director: Ari Aster Duration: 2h 7m
Two rules for dealing with the horror that is Hereditary. (1) Expect the unexpected. (2) Good luck with that. I haven’t been this frightened since I spent a night in the Overlook Hotel. Hereditary is one scary movie. Actually, it’s two. For his first feature, writer/director Ari Aster has crafted a family drama that kicks off with the death of matriarch Ellen, leaving her daughter Annie (Toni Collette), reeling with a combination of guilt and grief.
The sour mood soon infects the whole family — mellow husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), feckless high-schooler Peter (Alex Wolff ), and troubled daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who looks to be about 12. Dinner-table conversations open with recriminations and questions that are answered with more questions. That’s one strand of the film’s DNA. The other is a full-on onslaught of horror — seances, gruesome deaths, demonic visitations, hallucinations (or are they?), and one leap-out-of-your-skin moment that has to be the quietest jump-scare in cinema history.
If you could pull apart those threads, you’d have a dark, character-driven examination of dysfunctional-family dynamics on the one hand, and a terrifying ghost story on the other. Aster’s genius move is to bind them together in a way that diminishes neither. You care about these people. You fear for them. But you also fear them. Collette’s character is an artist who crafts strikingly realistic miniature rooms and houses. The opening scene features a slow camera push into a tiny bedroom that at some point seamlessly morphs into the real thing. It’s a brilliant beginning; the sense of artifice hangs in the air like smoke through the rest of the movie, leaving you forever uncertain whether to trust your senses — or which ones to trust. Cover your eyes — I admit that I watched most of Hereditary through shaky, splayed fingers — and the film’s expert sound design will still assault you, sometimes by its absence.
In the scene in which Peter has a conversation with his mother after a nightmare, all the sound drains out of the film except for the character’s voices. The rustle of movement or breath, the hum that is “room tone” — all gone. It feels queasifyingly wrong. If you thought A Quiet Place was quiet, think again. Composer Colin Stetson, whose instrument of choice is the bass sax, layers deep, darkly disturbing notes on the soundtrack, including tones so low they skip the eardrum and head straight for the gut. The phrase “evil sub-woofer” appeared in notes I took during the screening, again as a way of avoiding looking at the screen. But lift your eyes and all bets are off. Aster, aided by cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski and editors Lucian Johnston and Jennifer Lane, has a way of holding the camera on a shot for ... about ... two ... beats longer than feels natural. Sometimes the image is benign. Often it’s terrifying.
And then there are the ones where you can’t tell, and you want to strain your eyes to figure out what it is you’re supposed to be looking at.
Or, if you’re me, you don’t. Instead, you fiddle with your pen and write: “She’s a creepy kid even before she cuts the head off a dead bird.” Or: “Weird pan down into ground.” Or just: “No idea where it’s going but can’t be good.” I would have been too scared to go to see this if it weren’t my job, but I’m so glad I did.
There are twists in the narrative that will, it’s fair to say, come back to haunt you, like Charlie’s habit of sleeping in a treehouse outside Peter’s window, or Annie’s grief-group friend Joan (Ann Dowd), who introduces the idea of a seance. Or Annie’s admission, partway through the film, that she has a history of sleepwalking, and once almost killed the entire family while in a somnambulant state. Sweet dreams, kids!
What’s not there is waste. Hereditary runs 127 minutes — some of the best recent horrors tend to clock in at between 90 and 100 — but there isn’t an ounce of fat in the story. Aster has exploded on the scene with this first feature, Kubrickianly precise and masterfully paced. He’s been making shorts for a number of years, however, starting with the deliriously creepy The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, which you can find online with a quick Google. Hereditary might best be classified as his longest short to date, a sustained and brilliant story.