Movie Review: "Hereditary" Is Pure Nightmare Fuel for Anyone With a Family (So, Everyone)

Tragedy strikes a family and then things get really bad in the ultra-disturbing Hereditary.

Hereditary is deeply, deeply upsetting, in a way I did not anticipate and which the trailers do not prepare us for. That’s saying something, given how an entire cinema of children will forever be traumatised from the time its screeching teaser played ahead of Peter Rabbit.

It's not scary the way regular scary films are scary; it’s scary like bad news, or guilt, or grief. It burrows into the pit of your stomach, weighing you down, and when director Ari Aster deigns to give you a fright, he sends a jolt to the back of your throat.

Hereditary doesn’t make you jump. It gives you the glottal stops.

Toni Collette, introduced to Americans as the mother of a haunted kid in The Sixth Sense, plays another matriarch to tormented children here. We meet her character, Annie Graham, delivering the eulogy at the funeral for her estranged mum. Annie is resentful that her kids, Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro), are at risk of carrying her mother's mental illness; her husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), suspects Annie's own mental health might be declining when she claims to notice ghostly apparitions around the house. We later learn of Annie's previous breakdowns, which border on the Munchausen-by-proxy-esque. Then the excellent Ann Dowd shows up—always a bad sign, kindly as she seems—and teaches Annie to conduct a séance. This, you will immediately recognise, is a bad idea.

There’s more to it than I’m letting on. Oh God, is there more. But all you really need to know is that Hereditary is impressive and absorbing and pure nightmare fuel for anyone with a family (so, everyone).

Aster, following his hysterically-overwrought and disquieting short "The Strange Thing About the Johnsons", is becoming the go-to filmmaker for family rot. As a screenwriter, he’s setting a trend with stories about mistrust and mishandling among those tied together by blood. It’s incredibly nihilistic—the idea that those closest to us are to be feared most—but we’re not asking him to be our therapist; we’re asking him to freak us the f*** out, and by extrapolating on common family feuds, he’s pulling it off.

As a director, he creates terror with the camera. For instance, there's the visual descent into an open grave plot. And, in the disorienting, tone-setting opening, the lens pans from within the attic of the family home, where Annie makes miniature replicas of their house (and tragedies), before zooming into one such tableau until it can’t be distinguished from a real bedroom; sure enough, human characters begin walking around inside.

(Finally, someone’s taking advantage, in fiction, of creepy dollhouses, already put to odd effect in documentaries such as Of Dolls and Murder, about the "nutshells" of re-enacted crime scenes, and Voyeur, which recreated a tiny motel designed to allow easy spying on tenants.)

Of course, no matter how eerily the camera moves or how perfectly the match-cuts switch back and forth, Aster needs performers more emotive than dead-eyed dolls. Collette delivers a wired, heartbreaking turn, and though she offers plenty of subtle touches to Annie Graham, it’s her bug-eyed outburst at the dinner table that will play during her Oscar reel (and yes, she deserves the prize).

Alex Wolff, looking perpetually drenched in his own cold sweat, is put through the wringer here, and will hopefully come out the other side with the same movie offers being bestowed upon his brother Nat. Milly Shapiro, far from the cuddly embrace of her leading part in the stage show Matilda, accesses an unsettling energy as the mouth-clucking Charlie. And Dowd, aka Aunt Lydia from The Handmaid’s Tale, has clearly found a shtick and is sticking to it; that’s just fine with me.

It’d be easy to give Hereditary the nickname Rosemary’s Family, and it wouldn’t be unfair. This is very much 'terrifying' in the 'dread will enter all your porous areas' variety. Yet the scariest thing about Hereditary is how Ari Aster absolutely flattened me—someone who loves a good fright, and usually has the stomach for it—as if I was a figurine to be easily manipulated in his dollhouse of horrors. In Hereditary, the viewers are the victims too.

4/5

Hereditary arrives in Australian cinemas 7 June 2018. Rated MA15+ for strong horror themes.

Photo: StudioCanal