You know you're walking into a horror movie, but the brilliance of Ari Aster's Hereditary is the way it deftly hides its cards and stacks up mystery upon mystery, secret upon secret, madness upon madness, until everything unravels in demonic hellfire. The film ticks all the familiar elements of a ghost story -- a dead grandma, a spooky house, a grave robbery, a candlelit seance where spirits are summoned, a sleepwalker roaming the dim corridor, an occult sign written on the wall, a couple of headless corpses, etc -- but Hereditary rises above the genre formula with its coolly composed formalism, its deliberate pacing, and its sly psychological manipulation that almost convinces us at certain points that this is more of a domestic drama than a horror movie.
It begins with an obituary on the screen: Ellen Leigh is dead. Next we see her daughter Annie (Toni Collette, in all her hysterical splendour) giving a dry funeral speech that reveals her uneasy relationship with the deceased matriarch, now lying dead like a subdued witch in her open coffin. At the funeral we meet the family members: Annie's husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), her teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff) and her sullen preteen daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), whose physical tics, notably her clucking, set her up as a troubled child. In fact, everyone looks troubled -- not in any obvious, telltale fashion, but more like private agitation born out of some knowledge they can't share with anyone, even among themselves. Perhaps more than a scary movie, Hereditary is an honest yet bizarre study of a dysfunctional family plagued by paranoia and secrets.
Soon Annie, despite her disdain, joins a grief-relief support group. In one of her disturbing monologues (there'll be more), she talks about her wicked mother, her father, who died from wilful starvation caused by depression, and her schizophrenic brother, who killed himself. We think, What a colourful family, and naturally we begin to suspect the violent streak of mental disturbance has trickled down to Annie -- as well as to her children -- and that all the creepy things that have started happening to the family are a manifestation of madness and grief, rather than of a curse and the occult.
As I'm sure you'll agree, it's best not to know too much going into this film, easily the scariest in recent memory. Let's just say the film will tease you with clues (the grandma's necklace, the writing on the wall, the fact that a lot of people turn up for the funeral), and yet by the end of the film you'll still have more questions than answers. Which is a good thing, because it means that even in an age of pandering, the filmmakers have no desire to pander to us -- and they understand that the discomfort that underlies the appeal of all horror stories only remains discomforting when not all loose ends are tied and not all curses are revoked.
Collette, as Annie, deserves to be considered for acting prizes (though, obviously, actors in horror movies are always overlooked). Playing a grieving mother, a failed, flawed mother, Collette shows all the complex layers of feelings that are at once conflicted and understandable: she loves and hates her children, she strives for perfection in the knowledge that life -- including family -- can never be perfect (Annie works as a miniaturist building models of houses, meticulously constructed and painted through a magnifying lens). In the second half of the film, as the terror keeps mounting to near-breaking point, Annie is our villain and heroine, our saviour and executioner. That the film at once lets us feel sympathy towards the character only to push us away from her, disorienting us at every turn, is one of the wicked pleasures little derived from recent horror fare.
Hereditary feels refreshing because it's different without trying too hard. The film's scare grammar hearkens back to the 1970s and 80s, to Polanski and Kubrick and The Omen, while its psychological trickery is in tune with modern art house horror such as The Witch or Babadook. Multiplex audiences schooled in the mid-2000s, James Wan-style horror pictures -- the precise choreography of jump-scare and recycling of the haunted-house trope, such as in The Conjuring or Insidious -- will find the film too slow at the start and too obscure about where it's taking us. But be patient: this is a film that builds fear from within, the fear that feels unshakeable and transgressive because it grows inside us, and inside the poor family we're watching.
