First, the good. Ari Aster’s HEREDITARY is a beautifully well made film featuring fantastic performances, an unsettling mood, great music, and effective scares. Now, the bad. I hate to use the phrase “rip off” but it hews awfully close to a massively famous horror flick from the ‘60s. I won’t mention which one, because doing so would spoil the numerous pleasures this modern chiller has to offer. However, if you are at all versed in horror history, you might come away a little exasperated.
Toni Collette is absolutely riveting as Annie, a troubled middle-aged miniaturist, wife, and mother of two. The story begins at her mother’s funeral. We come to understand that her relationship with her mother was strained, to say the least. The movie turns on Collette’s performance and she delivers. Gabriel Byrne plays her increasingly concerned husband. Byrne is convincing as a warm, if stoic, rational man trying to hold his family together as tragedy occurs. Alex Wolff, who impressed me in MY FRIEND DAHMER, goes to a whole other level as oldest child, Peter. Wolff, who gets the meatiest part next to Collette, is immersive as the son who butts heads with his unraveling mother and is unaware of the impending danger that creeps ever closer to his family’s lives. Milly Shapiro is a revelation as the younger socially awkward and nut allergy afflicted daughter, Charlie. Shapiro has to play a quirky role and the young actress knocks it out of the park. Ann Dowd also plays her role of Joan, Annie’s new friend and fellow griever, perfectly. Matronly and empathetic, she seems to be everything that Annie’s mother wasn’t. After another terrible event shakes Annie to her core, Joan provides somewhat strange comfort to our clearly unstable lead. Is Annie losing her mind, though, or is something literally more diabolical happening?
This is a carefully constructed film, using cinematic tools to obfuscate and keep the viewer in the dark and on the edge of their seat. Pawel Pogorzelski composes some stunning imagery and disorients with expert camerawork. Much use is made of Annie’s strikingly accurate miniature dioramas to the point where it’s sometimes difficult to tell what’s real and what’s merely artifice, complimenting the mysterious maneuvers of the story itself. Aster, who wrote and directed, works with his cinematographer and composer Colin Stetson to weave a haunting and suffocating atmosphere. Stetson’s music masterfully adds an additional layer of dread to the proceedings. Script and performances work hand in hand to maximize our feelings for the characters. This is a film with class. With mainstream horror, that sometimes means the focus is on the psychological and not on gore. HEREDITARY has both. I was actually surprised by the amount of visceral images provided. No one will ever mistake this for a splatter film, but there are some fairly horrific sequences peppered into the visuals.
So, you can probably tell that I enjoyed the film and that it is expertly crafted. It has a pretty major problem, though. It’s difficult to ignore the massive similarities to that other film that I mentioned earlier. True, it’s definitely not a straight remake, but it works from the same blueprint. How much you enjoy this will probably depend on either your ignorance of the other film or how much you’re willing to forgive. It’s no doubt a very good or even excellent film, just not a very original one.
Ari Aster makes a splash with his debut film, HEREDITARY. Everything about the film is masterful, except for its originality. I especially admire how it structures the audience’s uncertainty about if we’re seeing mental illness or something more sinister. I am definitely looking forward to what Aster does next, I just hope it’s not as derivative. I watched this on 4K UHD and it is a gorgeous disc. The film itself is beautiful, too. Unnerving and deliberate, I recommend it with some caveats.
$949.00The price was $1,099.00
