BAD TRAITS
Creepy family will jolt you with terror in ‘Hereditary’
Starting with a tour de force shot recalling the work of David Lynch and Charlie Kaufman, writer-director Ari Aster's “Hereditary” hurls you through the looking glass into the macabre, topsy-turvy world of the Graham family. Wife and mother Annie Graham (horror queen Toni Collette, “The Sixth Sense”) is in the process of burying her mother. Her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), is trying to keep the kids — adolescent loner Peter (the talented Alex Wolff) and spooky-looking tweener Charlie (Milly Shapiro) — corralled and tend to his grieving wife. She's an artist who makes miniature versions of real things, mostly architectural, and she is way behind on her latest commission.
Charlie, who looks a bit birdlike and likes to make a clucking sound, takes after her mother, drawing in a sketchbook and making nasty-looking little animal-like effigies out of wire and scraps. In one of the film's early bits of grotesquerie, Charlie uses scissors to cut the head off a dead bird. A short time after the funeral, the cemetery calls to say that Annie's mother's grave has been “desecrated.”
In a sequence that have you squirming in your seat, Peter takes Charlie to a school dance, where he wants to see a girl he likes. Charlie, who is allergic, eats nutty cake with unusual relish and must be rushed to the hospital across an ocean of darkness (the film was shot in Utah). As a choking Charlie hangs out the window of the backseat, Peter loses control of his mother's car and brushes against a wooden utility post, and Charlie is killed horribly and Pete traumatized.
Subsequently, an almost overcome Annie seeks out a grief support group, where she meets Joan (Ann Dowd), a seemingly ordinary woman, who claims to be able to contact the dead and shows Annie how, using an invocation. Soon, Annie has collected Steve and Peter to stage her own seance and contact Charlie.
What happens in the rest of the film is both logic alina great horror-movie supernatural-story sort of way, and a dysfunctional family drama. And it is going to scare the stuffing out of you without a single (as I recall) jump-in-front-of-thecamera shot. A scene in which Peter is asleep in his bed, where he spends more and more time, something, perhaps made out of sheets of paper, perches above him on the corner wall and roof of his room, and some viewers at this point may flee the theaters in terror.
Writer-director Aster has a habit of holding shots of ordinary things for a long time, and with the help of the score by Colin Stetson
(“Lavender”) and cinematography by Pawel
Pogorzelski
(“Tragedy
Girls”), he imbues these things, such as a tree house where Charlie would often be found huddled, with inchoate power and hidden menace.
I need to see “Hereditary” again to unravel more of its secrets. But I believe the plot has an awful logic to it. The Judy Collins classic “Both Sides, Now,” which plays over the final credits, sounds, for the first time, remarkably creepy. Combining elements from Ira Levin's iconic “Rosemary's Baby” and the first season of HBO's “True Detective,” “Hereditary” is a stunning feature debut by a filmmaker to watch. Cluck.