Hereditary Review

This review comes from my Letterboxd profile, where I write movie reviews like this for every film I see.

With the reputation this film has received over the years, I assumed that Hereditary was going to be a film that purposefully confused you from the first scene, never concretely explaining its twists and turns to you and forcing you to figure it out yourself. It might require some individual thinking time after seeing the film or it might require a second watch, or even a third or a fourth. I've found those kinds of movies more and more fascinating over the years, and since I've been hearing great things about this one for three years, I wanted to finally check it out. In my opinion, this film is not a purposefully confusing film. For the majority of the runtime, the sequential events that occur in this film felt natural to me, even though they were consistently unsettling. It wasn't until the last 40 minutes or so of this movie where the meaning of the entire story starts to take shape that I realized that this was yet another unconventional horror film brought to you by the independent geniuses at A24 that continue to greenlight and distribute original and unique films like this.

What kept me engaged throughout the entire runtime of this film was the family drama. This is yet another exploration of grief through the eyes of a genre horror film, and it portrays every single character as going through grief in different ways. In particular, though, it emphasizes the struggles of the character played by Toni Collette, a mother who has already dealt with a surplus of trauma in her personal life and continuously finds more piling up in front of her. I genuinely didn't think Collette could top herself after The Sixth Sense, but I can't even IMAGINE how difficult, draining, and borderline traumatizing this performance must have been for her. She is constantly on the edge of insanity, her wires frayed continuously by more and more emotional devastation until she finally boils over the edge and holds nothing back. This is possibly one of the best performances I've ever seen, and the arguments she has with her family are some of the most realistic ever portrayed on screen.

The film's horror lingers not just because of some of the powerful imagery that demonstrates how fearless Ari Aster is as a filmmaker, but also because every frame feels like that lingering sense of painful dread that occurs after a heated family argument. Your heart is hurt, your brain is disoriented, you're essentially in a minor form of shock trying to process whatever just happened. The audience feels this sense all throughout the runtime of Hereditary, not just in the literal argument scenes but also in the buildup of horrific imagery that builds throughout the narrative. None of the scares feel cheap or even shocking, they just feel sickening in the best way possible.

However, I can't just praise Toni Collette for the work on display here. There are so many people I can praise for this film, particularly Aster for his brilliant direction and script, Colin Stetson for his heart-pounding score, and all of the other actors for the phenomenal work they do here. In particular, Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro, and Alex Wolff are also completely riveting from start to finish, allowing this broken family dynamic to create astronomically powerful tension through their perfect chemistry and constant state of being on edge. In fact, that's pretty much what Hereditary does to its viewers -- it keeps them on edge the entire time. It's a film that forces its audience to stay glued to the screen to get answers that may not be easily attainable, much like the grieving state of a family after the death of a loved one. It's tense, it's riveting, and it's completely unconventional. Say whatever you want about Ari Aster, but you can't deny he is bold in his filmmaking, and this is yet another homerun horror film from A24.

Letter Grade: A+