Hereditary

After recommendations from friends, decided to watch this recent horror flick. Backed by artsy distributors A24, it put me in mind of their previous experimental horror movie The Witch, which excited critics but didn’t resonate well with audiences. I remember The Witch fondly, daring to be different with the period setting and slow pace, but its problem was lack of scares. Hereditary is also slow-paced and experimental, and also hasn’t done overly well with audiences, probably mostly because general film audiences prefer to turn off their brains and enjoy formulaic scares when it comes to horror.

As long as it’s done well, I don’t care if a horror film is a rehash of old ideas or dares to be different. Hereditary definitely doesn’t play it safe, starting with a pretty ordinary set-up where a family is seemingly haunted after a death in the family, but soon hammering on the psychological trauma harder than just about any other film I can think of. There’s some degree of ambiguity whether anything is actually supernatural here or just a combination of human machination and delusions, which I quite like, and the film is unafraid of showing some of the starkest and most unpleasant imagery you can imagine.  

Toni Colette also gets real opportunity to shine here. I really loved her performance in The Sixth Sense where she kept everything restrained, but here where things can go to the extremes she gets to show what she can really do. It’s a tour de force that should be lauded regardless of whether it’s in a genre piece.  

Definitely not to everyone’s taste, and perhaps a little too slow and short on real tension for me to be drawn back to it again, and a little marred by some poor choices (like the little girl making a little popping noise with her tongue in an effort to have a creepy recurring sound), it was nonetheless one of the braver and more interesting horror films lately, in a world of Insidiouses and Conjurings that may entertain but don’t really attempt to get under the skin.