Three to see

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MODERN 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 Missed it at the cinema or on TV? We round up the best streaming and DVD releases of the week discomfiting orchestral score by composer Colin Stetson and unsettling sound effects like a teenage girl repeatedly clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth.

Like all stripteases, Ari Aster’s horror thriller ultimately has to bare all, and when the film performs its big reveal 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.