There are a lot of movies that claim to be "terrifying," but they are nothing more than a little frightening, disgusting, or jump scares. So a movie like Hereditary by Ari Aster stands out among the rest. It's genuinely terrifying, it's real disgusting, and the scary snap shots will really make you jump out of where you are. It's a perfectly terrifying movie on almost every level.
Actress Tony Collett plays Annie Graham, a woman whose mother just passed away and has left behind many different deep and different psychological scars. And it doesn't seem like her family can even muster the mental energy necessary to feel grief for this woman, whose mental illness has left a major and painful imprint on Annie, so she forces Annie to take her conflicting feelings elsewhere, to support groups, only to admit that she carries them. Gabrielle Byrne plays Annie's emotionally conservative husband, while Alex Wolff plays her traditional contraceptive teen son. And all of them help take care of the younger of them played by Millie Shapiro, who finds it difficult to communicate with other children, and who also has a tendency to cut off the heads of birds and use them as toys, and that alone indicates how dangerous what is going on in her mind. It so happened, and it is only a matter of time before this family explodes, and it seems that Ari Aster is very having fun making his fans wonder which characters are going to explode first. But don't worry, when they do explode, they do explode in an amazing, unexpected, and even shocking way. Every dramatic moment is displayed with the tension of classic dramas, and every terrifying frightening moment is delivered with a sudden change to our expectations for horror movies.
Horror movies ultimately depend on expectations. It either gives viewers what they want to see, or it changes direction and surprise us. Fortunately Hereditary does both, with a story that begins in the realm of psychological horror and then slowly dissolves into a surreal hidden world between metaphor and the supernatural, where family trauma begins to pile up, and characters begin to doubt their sanity. If Hereditary is a psychological horror movie, it offers everything you might want. If it is a horror movie paranormal, then it unfolds unexpectedly to become another type of movie as well. And if they are both, then he introduces both elements at the same time, challenging the audience to decide for himself what is real and what is just a dream, and what is the history of mental illness in the family that reveals itself in terrible, tragic ways. For a while anyway.
It is better not to divulge the Hereditary plot, but suffice it to say that something truly terrifying is happening to the Graham family, dividing them, revealing dark secrets and slowly tearing them apart. And for most of the film, we find these events plausible enough that Ari Lester lets her unfold on her own naturally and seriously, and gives Tony Collette and Alex Wolff in particular a chance to put on a great performance. Colette succeeds in giving a wonderful performance in which she is physically transformed into a living embodiment of sadness, resentment, fear and anger, as for Wolf, he is steadily descending from a rebellious son shouting at his mother to a child burdened with guilt and crying over his mother.
This naturalistic approach to the story gives the film a lot of emotional weight to the film, which extends to all the supernatural elements that float in the background, just after the family has disintegrated, and after Annie finds an unusual way of dealing with her overwhelming problems. The balance between natural and unnatural things, things that are easy to explain and others that cannot be explained at all, all of these elements make Hereditary appear blurry but positively. Anything can happen, and the audience can decide for themselves whether to watch a supernatural horror movie or just a very sad tragedy, narrated from the perspective of people who were losing their minds.
Or at least, that holds for a while. The only sign that Hereditary seems to have missed is at its end, when all these dreadful doubts accumulate and pile up to a climax that comes out with full force from the loudspeakers in the movie theater, but it also ends with (perhaps) too much of the answers to the movie's many questions. You can still see it both ways if you stare enough (and tilt your head aside), but whether the reason is a lack of confidence in the audience or an overconfidence in the film's cleverness, it seems not a sound decision that after spending two hours watching the film made the audience reach their own shocking conclusions about The mysterious story the film tells and then the film offers its own interpretations. Especially when these explanations are less frightening than the expectations that have been running through your head the whole time. But all of the above is nothing more than small flaws, as Hereditary remains a very horrific movie that will affect you, challenge you and provide you with a great performance from the actors which could be considered one of the best this year. Hereditary is a horror movie that beats the rest, although sometimes it expects it to be better than it really is.
Conclusion Hereditary is one of the scariest movies amongst other horror movies current, with great performances by Tony Collette and Alex Wolff. Hidden traumas and realistic drama come together to create a dreamlike atmosphere, filled with psychological horror, whose events escalate to reach a climax that you will not forget any time soon ... although you may end up wishing that the film did not let you try to explain much of its ambiguities And his secrets on your own.
