Family ties
Matriarch’s death leads to slow-burn scares in flawed but interesting ‘Hereditary’
With his feature debut — the unsettling horror film “Hereditary” — writer-director Ari Aster both excites and frustrates.
On the one hand, he largely eschews the jump scares so prevalent in many of today’s spooky cinematic affairs for more slowly delivered frights, and he takes an artistic approach to telling a pretty unusual story.
On the other, his storytelling can get a bit muddy, if not downright sloppy, especially as “Hereditary” builds to its bizarre-but-fascinating conclusion.
That keeps it from becoming quite as engrossing as it could have been when you think of all it has going for it, including an intense performance from star Toni Collette.
The positives outweigh the negatives, however, as the evil increasingly overwhelms the good in this tale of a cursed family.
“Hereditary” begins with the image of an obituary for a 78-year-old woman named Ellen, who, the newspaper blurb states, died in the house of her daughter. That daughter is Collette’s Annie, who delivers a eulogy in which she says her mother was a private, even “secretive” person who resisted when you pried into her life. Annie says it goes so far as to say her mother would probably be angry at the idea of being spoken about in this setting.
Annie asks her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), if she should feel worse about Ellen’s death, and Steve tells her she should feel however she feels. It’s clear right away things often weren’t well between mother and daughter. We will learn there was a period of estrangement but that Ellen ultimately spent her final stretch of life in the house of Steve and Annie.
The others left to resume their lives in that house are pot-loving teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff) and younger daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who, with her blank looks and odd mouth clicking, fits right into a horror-movie environment.
Turns out Grandma especially loved Charlie, but she also apparently had told the young girl she wished she were male. So there’s that.
Perhaps shaken by the loss of this important figure, Charlie asks her mother who will take care of her when she, Annie, dies. (Gee, um, that doesn’t sound ominous or anything.)
Annie is a miniaturist artist, and she refocuses on the pieces in her workshop. These pieces, which will be part of an approaching gallery show, are representations of spaces important to her, starting with her house. (The film begins with Aster creeping the camera into the model of Peter’s bedroom, then transitioning the audience seamlessly into the actual room. This is, of course, a visual motif he employs from time to time in “Hereditary.”)
To reveal the film’s first major plot point would be to give away too much, but, rest assured, it is a very bad thing — the first of many.
As evil closes its grip on her family, Annie begins to unravel. Is her family truly cursed or is she losing her mind? She and Steve do not reach the same conclusion as the story progresses.
About midway through the film, Annie meets Joan (Ann Dowd), who offers a much-needed ear and friendship. However, if you’ve seen Dowd’s memorable work on acclaimed series “The Leftovers” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” you’ll find it difficult — as convincing as her performance is in her first few scenes — to believe that Joan will prove to be a force for good in Annie’s life.
Collette (“Little Miss Sunshine,” “The Hours”), deservedly, will get the most attention for acting work in this film. In her hands, Annie is a compelling figure, if not always an entirely sympathetic one.
However, Wolff (“Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”) also makes a real impression as the increasingly tortured Peter.
And, again, Shapiro is adept at giving you the heebie jeebies, while also managing to make Charlie at least a bit endearing. (OK, maybe not when the girl cuts off the head of a bird that had slammed into her classroom window and died, but some of the time.)
As for the work behind the camera, there is a lot to like about what Aster is trying to do.
According to the film’s production notes, “Hereditary” was inspired both by slow-burn 1960s horror films “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Innocents,” as well as potent dramas in which multiple generations of families deal with complex situations, such as “Ordinary People” (1980) and “In the Bedroom” (2001). That intriguing mix largely rings true in what Aster has made.
However, his writing at times leads to needless distractions. For instance, he establishes early on that Charlie has an extreme nut allergy, and yet twice the girl is nowhere near an EpiPen — a problem that easily could have been avoided, or at the
very least explained.
And his direction, while largely laudable for its building-to-dread approach, is a little too disorienting in the film’s crazy climactic stretch. Some of that no doubt is by design — we certainly aren’t meant to feel comfortable by that point — but it makes it hard to lose yourself in the events.
Ultimately, “Hereditary” is a worthwhile, if disturbing, journey to take. If nothing else, it should make your own family life seem a bit rosier.