Dead nan walking
HEREDITARY (15) ★★★★ ★
M ODERN horror films seldom prioritise nerve-shredding suspense – the kind of creeping dread that sends beads of sweat trickling down your spine and haunts your waking dreams.
Instead, we’re spoon-fed a familiar diet of senseless slaughter and jump scares.
The last film to achieve that high-wire act of sustained tension was Robert Eggers’s supernatural thriller, The Witch.
Writer-director Ari Aster’s twisted family portrait comes close to repeating the feat, only to descend into madness with a loopy final act that will sharply divide and perplex audiences who have been biting their nails down to the cuticle for the previous 90 minutes.
Hereditary performs a cinematic striptease, holding our gaze (even when we want to look away) by peeling away the layers of darkness and deceit that condemn one grief-stricken family to a grim fate. It’s a masterclass in terror titillation, choreographed to a discomfiting orchestral score by composer Colin Stetson. Like all stripteases, Ari Aster’s horror thriller ultimately has to bare all, and when the film performs its big reveal – with a flourish – we realise we have seen this story many times before. Miniaturist artist Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is deeply affected by the death of her estranged mother, who cast a long shadow over the family and took Annie’s daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) under her wing. Following the secretive matriarch’s funeral, Annie begins to sense a presence in the family home and her erratic behaviour causes grave concern for husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff).
In desperation, Annie turns to a grief support group where she meets a local woman called Joan (Ann Dowd), who has suffered her own recent loss. Joan sweetly suggests Annie could conduct a seance to forge a connection to her mother’s lingering spirit.
As the disturbances within the Graham family home increase in frequency, Annie makes a bold decision that has terrifying repercussions for her loved ones.
Hereditary slowly tightens a knot of discomfort, heightened by a bravura lead performance from Collette, who turns silent screams into an artform.
Aster demonstrates a flair for sadistic mind games and slow-burn shocks. The resolution is an anti-climax after the film has spent more than an hour dragging the narrative’s nails down a blackboard.
However, there is no denying that Aster engineers creepy moments, one of which made me audibly gasp.