HereditaryThe pain families inflict on one another is a kind of curse, conjuring suffering and emotional devastation. Hereditary is a psychological horror movie about the Graham family, and the catastrophic aftermath following the death of its matriarch, Ellen. Her daughter, Annie (Toni Collette), struggles with mixed feelings for her late mother, as she works on her art--a series of miniature dioramas depicting uncomfortable events in her life. After another tragedy befalls the family, Annie sinks into despair and rage, envisioning supernatural manifestations that she believes threatens to strip away everything that she claims to love.
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The way that Hereditary delivers its slow burn of creeping horror recalls films like Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, from its tone to the subject matter. Annie secretly attends a support group to cope with her feelings of ambivalence for the loss of her mother, yet she lies to her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), about it by claiming that she is going to the movies. She shares with the group that her father and brother both killed themselves for reasons she attributes to mental illness. Annie is a bundle of resentment and anger, evident even as she delivers a jaded eulogy for her late mother. She is a psychologically complex character, whose mood swings and explosive rages also suggest bipolar disorder. Her highly detailed miniatures of her life--which she obsessively works on for extended periods of time--are a form of passive aggression, manifesting her metaphorical demons in snapshots of dark moments haunting her past. These miniature models are how Annie tries to gain some semblance of control over her life--her escape from a world where she otherwise feels powerless. Annie's mania, fury, and pain leads to one of many episodes where she explodes in anger at her son, Peter (Alex Wolff), and accuses him of transgressions that are really directed at herself. Toni Collette's performance has Annie constantly threatening to boil over at any minute--an incredibly raw and vulnerable expression of a soul not just laid bare, but with the skin flensed away. Annie recalls her mother as overbearing and domineering, and subsequently displays these same qualities with her own children, resenting them when they hesitate to show their love for her. She shares her sorrow with a fellow member of the support group, Joan (Ann Dowd), as she struggles with her perceptions of being taken for granted and the guilt that follows her reactions. Steve is generally passive to Annie's outbursts, rarely interceding on his children's behalf, instead retreating into alcohol or pills. Peter flees from responsibility; he neglects his academics by playing guitar and smoking marijuana, masking the hurt of feeling unwanted by his mother. The youngest daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), spends her days drawing disquieting pictures in her journal, and clicking her tongue as a kind of nervous tic. She possesses an unsettling mix of fey innocence and an aura of being in symbiosis with malevolent powers, recalling the early horror movie roles of Drew Barrymore or Heather O'Rourke from Poltergeist. Everyone in the Graham household appears to be suffering from a lingering trauma--a precarious balance that comes down like a house of cards while the dominant member of the household (Annie) casts her shadow over the rest of the family, like with Jack Torrance in The Shining.
As with the miniature rooms Annie crafts in eerie detail, the motifs in Hereditary are totems of a larger meaning. Hereditary treats the head of a body as the most important physical aspect of a being--the rest is just extraneous flesh. This is introduced in a visceral way after a bird kills itself by flying into the window of Charlie's classroom. Charlie decapitates the bird with scissors after school, saving the head in the pouch of her extra-large orange hoodie; she later draws a picture of it in her journal with a crown on its head. Violence in Hereditary often involves the heads of the victims, underscoring that the head is the home of psychological suffering. Another motif is about the divide that exists--even on the most innocuous levels--between men and women in the household. When Annie and Joan describe the tragic fates that have befallen their loved ones, they refer to the untimely deaths of men or boys. Many cinematic depictions of a dysfunctional family favor depicting the father as the abuser; but it is Annie who lashes out at her children--Steve hesitates to speak up in his children's defense out of fear. Acrimony between the genders is also explored in Charlie, like when she comments with resentment that her grandmother wanted her to be a boy. Consider how the spelling of Charlie's name is more often associated with men than women, where it is usually spelled as "Charley". She also seems to occupy a wavelength all of her own, without distinctly male or female traits; even her orange hoodie feels like a deliberate counterpoint to gender-defined color schemes.
For much of Hereditary, the prevailing question is whether Annie is crazy or if she and her household are legitimately cursed by diabolical forces beyond her comprehension--or even if these are mutually exclusive. Feelings of paranoia, conspiracy, and everyday people falling prey to evil schemes recalls Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. The quiet community in which Annie and her family reside is depicted as traditional and conservative--underage drinking or marijuana use notwithstanding. After Ellen is buried, Annie discovers a book on "spiritualism" among her mother's secreted away possessions, suggesting an interest in the occult. But because of Annie's cognitive dissonance, it becomes difficult to differentiate whether this discovery contributed to her subsequent breakdown, or if it is influenced by it. Annie says that her brother killed himself because he was schizophrenic; this casts the specter of doubt over the veracity of Annie's perceptions of unexplained phenomena--whether something is supernatural, or just a part of a complex delusion born from mental instability. With Annie's emotions running rampant, she exposes the rest of her family to her psychosis, spreading the devastation of her mental disease like a virulent plague. As the surviving members of the Graham household fall prey to these "forces", even the audience is swallowed up in the radiating madness, as the boundaries between fantasy and reality become increasingly blurred. Like the best psychological horror movies, Hereditary depicts evil in everyday terms, with manifestations of demons as metaphors for psychological trauma as well as things that lurk in darkness.
Recommended for: Fans of a complex horror film that explores how an unquiet mind can devastate a family and the ease with which evil can corrupt from within. Hereditary is an emotionally overwhelming movie, filled with emotional trauma and physical violence, and belongs alongside thematically similar horror movies, like The Witch, also released by A24.
As with the miniature rooms Annie crafts in eerie detail, the motifs in Hereditary are totems of a larger meaning. Hereditary treats the head of a body as the most important physical aspect of a being--the rest is just extraneous flesh. This is introduced in a visceral way after a bird kills itself by flying into the window of Charlie's classroom. Charlie decapitates the bird with scissors after school, saving the head in the pouch of her extra-large orange hoodie; she later draws a picture of it in her journal with a crown on its head. Violence in Hereditary often involves the heads of the victims, underscoring that the head is the home of psychological suffering. Another motif is about the divide that exists--even on the most innocuous levels--between men and women in the household. When Annie and Joan describe the tragic fates that have befallen their loved ones, they refer to the untimely deaths of men or boys. Many cinematic depictions of a dysfunctional family favor depicting the father as the abuser; but it is Annie who lashes out at her children--Steve hesitates to speak up in his children's defense out of fear. Acrimony between the genders is also explored in Charlie, like when she comments with resentment that her grandmother wanted her to be a boy. Consider how the spelling of Charlie's name is more often associated with men than women, where it is usually spelled as "Charley". She also seems to occupy a wavelength all of her own, without distinctly male or female traits; even her orange hoodie feels like a deliberate counterpoint to gender-defined color schemes.
For much of Hereditary, the prevailing question is whether Annie is crazy or if she and her household are legitimately cursed by diabolical forces beyond her comprehension--or even if these are mutually exclusive. Feelings of paranoia, conspiracy, and everyday people falling prey to evil schemes recalls Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby. The quiet community in which Annie and her family reside is depicted as traditional and conservative--underage drinking or marijuana use notwithstanding. After Ellen is buried, Annie discovers a book on "spiritualism" among her mother's secreted away possessions, suggesting an interest in the occult. But because of Annie's cognitive dissonance, it becomes difficult to differentiate whether this discovery contributed to her subsequent breakdown, or if it is influenced by it. Annie says that her brother killed himself because he was schizophrenic; this casts the specter of doubt over the veracity of Annie's perceptions of unexplained phenomena--whether something is supernatural, or just a part of a complex delusion born from mental instability. With Annie's emotions running rampant, she exposes the rest of her family to her psychosis, spreading the devastation of her mental disease like a virulent plague. As the surviving members of the Graham household fall prey to these "forces", even the audience is swallowed up in the radiating madness, as the boundaries between fantasy and reality become increasingly blurred. Like the best psychological horror movies, Hereditary depicts evil in everyday terms, with manifestations of demons as metaphors for psychological trauma as well as things that lurk in darkness.
Recommended for: Fans of a complex horror film that explores how an unquiet mind can devastate a family and the ease with which evil can corrupt from within. Hereditary is an emotionally overwhelming movie, filled with emotional trauma and physical violence, and belongs alongside thematically similar horror movies, like The Witch, also released by A24.