A chilling new horror classic
Hereditary
CHIEF FILM CRITIC 15 cert, 127 min Ari Aster
Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd
The comedian Norm Macdonald once said that the perfect joke would be one in which the set-up and the punchline were identical. I’m becoming increasingly convinced that something very similar holds for horror: being blindsided by fright might be fun in the moment, but it’s the scares you can see coming that last. In Rosemary’s Baby, Mia Farrow spent more than two hours of screen time working out what every audience member knew was afoot in its opening minutes – and it was the deeply carved certainty of it that made your skin creep. Say what you will about Satan, but the dark lord doesn’t get hung up on spoilers.
Now, I would defy anyone to guess in advance where Hereditary ends up: “left turn” doesn’t begin to describe the go-for-broke third-act contortions of Ari Aster’s thrillingly brooding and grisly directorial debut. But each of its individual scares is so meticulously foreshadowed by some off-key incidental detail – a strange turn of phrase, an odd face in a crowd – that when it lands, it does so with an extra chill of inescapability, as if its characters’ fates had been sealed from the start. That it arrives in cinemas just in time for Rosemary’s Baby’s 50th birthday feels like more than a coincidence. Like Roman Polanski’s film, Aster’s works by constantly gaslighting its main characters. They’re all given just enough reason to believe that the shocks could be figments of their rapidly splintering psyches, even though to us, it’s grimly clear that they aren’t.
In an extraordinary, multi-layered, soul-peeling performance, Toni Collette stars as Annie Graham, an artist and mother-of-two coming to terms with the recent death of her own mother, Ellen – a “secretive, suspicious” woman whom Annie, her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and 18-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff, from My Friend Dahmer) aren’t necessarily all that heartbroken to be laying to rest. The exception is 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who evidently shared a special bond with her grandmother – though she takes after her mother too, scribbling on sketch pads and crafting models from bric-a-brac, just as Annie hides away in her studio, sculpting tiny, hyperdetailed dioramas of their family life. In a brilliant piece of organic camera trickery, Aster shoots the Graham household with lateral tracking shots and tilt-shift lenses, abstracting and miniaturising the domestic space, and making it unclear exactly how each room connects to the next.
This is something you may find yourself fretting over with an increasing sense of urgency, once a chain of events apparently prompted by Ellen’s demise drops the entire family into a labyrinth of escalating terrors. Collette performs this fantastically – you can see her mind ping-ponging between possibilities when things get fraught – and the film’s sound design is next to faultless: a noise as gentle as a tongue clicking against the roof of someone’s mouth is made to throb with dread.
After a lively reception at the Sundance Festival in January, Hereditary has been vigorously sold – some would say oversold – as one of the scariest horrors in years: as ever with these things, your mileage may vary, but I went in pre-jaded by the hype and even so haven’t had a sound night’s sleep since. There are images here that are nightmarish to their core – not necessarily that gory, but real roiling id stuff, riddled with the icky bits of Buñuel and Lynch, yet photographed with a lucid calm that makes them incredibly hard to brush off. One of the very best, or worst, relies on your eye being drawn to a barely perceptible background detail, and it’s entirely possible you could watch the film without noticing it. Lying in bed wide-awake at about 1am on Wednesday, feeling physically unable to look in the corner of the room, I have to say that part of me wished that I hadn’t.
As with Rosemary’s Baby – and also, more recently, Ben Wheatley’s Kill List – Hereditary ends with a worst-casescenario meltdown that will likely prove the last straw for all viewers who have struggled to align themselves with the film’s murky, ambiguous rhythms. This is categorically not a film that will be universally admired – but even as it cleaves to old formulas, it transports your mind to new terrain that feels genuinely and frighteningly hostile, and leaves you with plenty of mental souvenirs by which to remember the trip. Even in the context of the genre’s current hot streak – Get Out, The Witch, It Follows, A Quiet Place, The Babadook – it feels like a new horror classic.