Hereditary may be slow-burn, but it burns bright and intense. With some of the most unsettling horror images and setpieces, it is one of the best horror movies in recent memory.
When horror is done right, terrifying, heart-stopping horror, it grabs every one of your senses and makes you hyper-aware of all of them. It lays in wait, biding its time and revealing just enough throughout until the story comes crashing together at the end. It has a grounding in something real and human so that the horror feels even more imminent. Considering that definition, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Hereditary is horror done perfectly.
Director Ari Aster joins the ranks of Robert Eggers (The Witch), Jordan Peele (Get Out), and Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) who all made their feature film debut with stunning horror movies. However, what they all also have in common is that they challenge the constraints of the genre. The Witch is a period piece, Get Out is a social satire, and The Babadook is a psychological drama. With Hereditary, Aster again blurs the line of horror to create a twisted, horribly remarkable film.
Hereditary does a great job of not letting its audience on to what kind of movie it is for much of its running time. It’s not even until it’s final moments that you truly know what kind of movie it was. At the center of the movie is the Graham family. Annie (Toni Collette) is an artist who focuses on creating miniatures, particularly inspired by her life. Her husband Steve (the fantastic Gabriel Byrne) is a stoic professional-type. Together they have two kids, Peter (strongly performed by Alex Wolff), a typical teenager, and 13-year-old daughter Charlie (played by Milly Shapiro in a remarkable film debut).
Annie is dealing with the recent loss of her mother—the movie begins on the day of her funeral. She explains during her eulogy that her mother was a secretive woman and someone she had a complicated relationship with. However, who did have a strong relationship with Annie’s mother was Charlie. It’s well-established that Charlie is not your typical 13-year-old. She doesn’t seem to understand basic social norms. She spends much of her time with her nose in a sketchbook drawing the people around her. At one point, she does something so bizarre that the entire audience recoiled at it.
All of these things point to Hereditary being one type of movie. A creepy child, an emotionally vulnerable mother, and an isolated house in the woods sounds like something familiar. However, something happens. Something truly shocking and remarkable happens. It’s a moment that will be engrained in the rest of the movie and in your mind long after the credits roll. Hereditary is made up of moments like that. However, it starts at this point. The movie is recontextualized and where it ends up is almost impossible to parse out.
And although the movie is wholly original, it feels like a culmination of this new golden age of horror that we’re in. The aptest comparison is probably to The Babadook. The main success of that movie is that the horror is wrapped around something familiar in all of us—grief and loss. A lot of the slow-burning first hour of Hereditary is spent exploring grief and loss, particularly in Annie’s character. Collette is remarkable as she navigates her emotions following this event. She plays Annie like someone who bears the weight of all the events that led to this point in her life on her shoulders. You empathize with her. So as she falls further down the rabbit hole of possible insanity, you can’t help but be heartbroken.
However, the emotional elements of the movie aren’t the most impressive thing about it. I can say, without qualification, that Hereditary is the most horrifying and upsetting movies I’ve seen in theaters. There’s an impressive sense of dread that sits on top of the movie similarly to The Conjuring. You’re constantly trying to parse out what is going to wrong, but Aster makes it nearly impossible to do that. The movie takes a few sharp turns that always make sense, but are also completely unexpected. And those turns are stitched together with horrifying images and set pieces that don’t rely on jump scares or sudden spikes in the score—composer Colin Stetson does a fantastic job underscoring the dread and tension—but rather leveraging our own fears and insecurities against us.
There are parts where you’re not even sure what the horrifying thing is, then you hear a wave of gasps and whispers as the audience eventually discovers it. Aster brilliantly frames and stages set pieces by going with the least obvious route to affect the audience. It’s those kinds of scares, combined with the unpredictability of the storytelling that makes Hereditary an experience like no other.
It’s hard to recommend Hereditary without divulging exactly what kind of movie it is. But this feels like broad horror combined with arthouse. It has the oppressive dark energy of The Conjuring, the patient enigmatic storytelling of The Witch, the emotional heft of The Babadook, and the horrifying visceral imagery of The Shining. It’s a horror fan’s dream.
It’s shocking that this is a debut. It’s assured in its style and meticulously plotted. Repeat viewings will be rewarded. Collette’s Oscar-worthy performance grounds us in the reality of grief and loss while the story and plot unravel something a lot more sinister. At its core, Hereditary is perhaps a haunted house story. But a more apt description might be a haunted family story. Psychologically haunted or supernaturally haunted aside, Hereditary will creep its way into your nightmares. Good luck sleeping. *tongue click*
Hereditary is available to watch on Amazon →
★★★★½ out of five
Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.