Stars: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne, Ann Dowd
Director: Ari Aster
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) The film centers, at least initially, around Annie (Collette), a miniaturist artist, who lives with her nuclear family in the middle of nowhere (you get the sense this is Canada or Wyoming based on how spread out things are and both hilly/flat). Her mother has died before the film began, and her family is reacting differently to it, with her daughter Charlie (Shapiro), taking it the hardest. Charlie is odd, clearly suffering from some sort of social anxiety, and the sort of "creepy kid" we've come to expect to be weary of in horror pictures. We learn through an anonymous support group that Annie's childhood was fraught with mental illness, her father dying when she was young, her brother killing himself and blaming her mother, and her mother suffering from dissociative-identity-disorder. In a tragedy that comes as a true shock (and throws your preconceived notions of the film into orbit), Charlie dies a third of the way through the movie, when after suffering an allergic reaction to peanuts, she is decapitated when her brother Peter (Wolff) is barreling down the highway at 90 mph and her head hits a pole. It's a jarring scene, one that shows you are no longer in control of the film, and none of them easy.
We're conditioned at this point, in the era of The Babadook and mother! to be looking for metaphors, and if you try hard enough, you can find them. There's clearly a fascinating take on motherhood, perhaps postpartum depression, grief, women's roles in the family, the destruction of the nuclear family as a whole...but honestly, what I think makes Hereditary so interesting as a picture is that it works really well as a straight horror film. You don't need a metaphor to make this film truly terrifying, and perhaps the metaphors are situated as a red herring. You're meant for most of the picture to question whether or not Annie and her son Peter are falling prey to the same mental illness that has ravaged their family. After all, that's what we'd expect in another picture, but this just serves as a red herring. The reality is that what's happening, is, well, actually happening. Charlie is trying to return, perhaps to warn her mother, perhaps to aid her into giving up her son, and this is a family that has devoted its life to a King of Hell named Paimon, who has possessed Charlie since her birth, but really wants a male body and so is looking to inhabit Peter. Upon re-watching the film, I suspect you'll find a lot of clues that this was always the intention, but because we assume it's all mental illness (it makes sense the opposite direction), it plays a bit with our assumptions about recent horror movies that it's entirely a metaphor, when really Hereditary works best to be taken literally, and that makes it all-the-more-horrifying, because there's literally nothing any of the characters can do to stop their fates-every one of them is doomed the moment the opening credits begin.
A lot has been made in the past two decades about how Toni Collette is under-utilized in modern cinema, and Hereditary proves that is correct. An Oscar nominee for The Sixth Sense and a Tony Award-nominee for The Wild Party (who can sing, casting directors!), she never really became the headliner the woman who beat her with AMPAS (Angelina Jolie) did. Collette clearly relishes this role, not playing with the horror movie tropes we'd expect, making her Annie a fully-fleshed human being. Collette said in an interview that she doesn't watch horror movies, which may be why she's so damn good here (no shade intended to horror film acting-put the pearls down). Her performance is based more on what we'd expect from a heavy drama, a woman bereft with grief and coping with fear, practically begging us to find a metaphor, and as a result she feeds the red herring while also giving her best work in decades. Her costars are all up-to-the-task as well. Wolff gets the film's most challenging part, a physical feat where he occasionally has to mimic his sister, a demon, while still being a pretty blank-slate stoner for his mother to both hate and have a resistant love toward, but he pulls it off. And Ann Dowd, taking on the part of the Ruth Gordon character from Rosemary's Baby (the clearest predecessor to this picture), is sensational as a "friend" of Annie's who is also struggling with grief, but is there to lure a mourning mother into darkness. Dowd is so good so often it's easy to take for granted, but the way that she unpacks what could be a to-the-rafter style character is delicious. I loved the scene in the parking lot, where her Joanie knows the importance of that moment and keeps underlining her "script," something fed to her by Annie's mother. It feels so kind and genuine initially, and then as the film progresses we look back on that scene for the nastiness that it contains. That's a great summary, in fact, for Ari Aster's film-as-a-whole, and I can't wait to see what he has in store next.
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