Prepare for ‘Hereditary’ frights
Sundance film will scare you out of your ski boots.
PARK CITY, Utah – If you’d ever like to sleep again, you should probably steer clear of A24’s latest horror offering.
Hereditary, which flew in under the radar on the Sundance Film Festival lineup, is the paralyzing feature-film debut of shorts director Ari Aster, who wrote the script four years ago amid unspecified family turmoil.
“It was just this rapid succession of very, very painful things happening and the prevailing feeling became that we were cursed,” Aster told festival-goers after the film’s screening.
Like any scary movie, you’ll probably get the most enjoyment out of Heredi
tary if you go in blind. But to give you at least a vague sense of what it’s about, the film centers on the Graham family, who are heading to their estranged grandmother’s funeral when the story begins. While Annie (Toni Collette), Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and their teenage son, Peter (Alex Wolff ), are remarkably unaffected by the loss, the late matri- arch still has a sinister grip on daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro, bound to go down as a child horror-movie icon).
Creepy drawings, fiery séances and decapitated floating corpses are just a few of the scares that will haunt your nightmares after Hereditary, which grounds its thrills in harrowing family drama, and manages to make welltrod genre tropes feel fresh with twisted humor and minimal special effects.
If you don’t believe us, many others found it equally unsettling.
“Hereditary feels like you’re discovering M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth
Sense for the first time but with darker impulses and intentions,” tweeted Rob Hunter, chief film critic for Film School
Rejects. “Grief, guilt, ghosts, and one monster performance by Toni Collette.”
“So disquieting, you’ll be gasping for air in the theater. Utterly believable supernatural horror,” Time Out New
York senior film critic Joshua Rothkopf wrote. “There will be no scarier movie this year. If there is, it means we’re in a new golden age.”
No release date has been set.