☆☆
Among the sights to behold in Hereditary are a decapitated head covered with swarming ants, a child using scissors to snip off the head of a dead bird, and a woman sawing off her own head with wire or maybe dental floss. When you're watching a floating, possessed woman sawing off her own head, it's hard to take notice of details like what she's using to do it.
This is a whacko film, a movie that is destined to divide audiences -- or maybe unite them in their Trump-era distaste for the highbrow critics on Rotten Tomatoes, where Hereditary has a near-perfect Top Critics score of 98 percent, an almost-unanimous consensus that I'm wagering audiences won't share, thanks to its off-the-charts weirdness that would be endearing if only the movie weren't so overstuffed with a convoluted plot.
It's so unexpectedly weird that near the end of the movie, the character played by Toni Collette all but stops the film cold as she tries to explain everything that the film has been unable to make clear. Wild-eyed and more than half-crazed, she tries to bundle up all of the film's loose ends and make sense of them, but it's to little avail, I'm afraid: When I saw Hereditary, half of the audience was holding back snickers, while a few brave folks ventured loud guffaws. Then again, the twenty-somethings on my way out were already on the phone, telling friends, "I just saw the scariest movie ever." So, make of that what you will.
As borderline insane as Hereditary is, it is either smart enough or not brave enough to go really over the edge the way Darren Aronofsky did in last year's unhinged mother!, though toward the end it comes close. At its best, Hereditary is harrowing and even gripping, and at its worst, which is basically the last half of the film, it's sometimes howlingly terrible.
It gets off to a fantastic start: A newspaper obituary introduces a dead matriarch, and in short order we meet her grieving, not-exactly loving daughter Annie (Collette). Annie's marriage seems to be crumbling and whose children are having a hard time coping with what we gather has been a less-than-idyllic family life. They live in a rambling, perpetually underlit house out in the country, where Annie hand crafts creepy and disturbing miniature dioramas of her psychologically fraught family life.
Annie's husband (played by Gabriel Byrne) mostly leaves her alone, as do her son Peter (Alex Wolff) and seemingly sickly daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro). While Annie tries to make sense of her mother's death and the uncomfortable relationship they had, Peter and Charlie take off one evening -- and only one of them comes back.
The family descends further into crisis, and at this point, it looks as if Hereditary might base its horror on the genuine terrors of a dysfunctional family. As Annie cracks up and the family unit falls apart, Hereditary is on track to doing for intense grief what The Babadook did for depression or It Follows did for sexually transmitted diseases: to become a freakish and unsettling metaphor for a deeper emotional trauma.
But that's not what happens. Instead, Hereditary makes a sharp turn into something far crazier and far less interesting, and while I won't spoil exactly what that is here, I'll say that the movie's plot bears more than a little resemblance to the original Wicker Man and, most especially, to Rosemary's Baby.
That would be fine, but the two parts of the film never connect, and the film's big revelation is curiously uninteresting, if only because the movie's first half is so strong. It's quiet and confident, bearing a lot of similarity to The Sixth Sense, which also starred Collette (whose Oscar buzz seems, truth be told, more connected to her credit on this film as an executive producer than to her actual performance, which whiplashes between intelligent anguish and crazed screaming). There's nowhere the film could possibly go that wouldn't be fulfilling -- except where it does go, which is into a place so mismatched with where it started, that Hereditary falters and becomes eye-rollingly silly rather than shocking.
Ann Dowd, so good as Aunt Lydia in TV's "The Handmaid's Tale," comes into the film relatively late, and is asked to take on essentially the same character Ruth Gordon played in Rosemary's Baby, but there's something faltering about writer-director Ari Aster's take on things: both Dowd's pivotal character and the story as a whole lack the paranoid claustrophobia of the movie that serves as its inspiration (not to mention Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and M. Night Shyamalan's films).
What should be nightmarish is too often mostly silly, and also inexplicable: If you do see Hereditary, you'll probably wind up, like I did, going online afterward to figure out if others have deciphered the thing. Spoiler: They have, and those breathless write-ups ("the summer's scariest movie!" blares one) are vastly more entertaining than the movie itself.
But if you do wind up going to see it, do me a favor: Let me know what it is I missed in Hereditary, because I sense I missed a lot. Except the woman cutting off her own head. That I didn't miss. I just wish I had.
Viewed June 8, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
2000
This is a whacko film, a movie that is destined to divide audiences -- or maybe unite them in their Trump-era distaste for the highbrow critics on Rotten Tomatoes, where Hereditary has a near-perfect Top Critics score of 98 percent, an almost-unanimous consensus that I'm wagering audiences won't share, thanks to its off-the-charts weirdness that would be endearing if only the movie weren't so overstuffed with a convoluted plot.
It's so unexpectedly weird that near the end of the movie, the character played by Toni Collette all but stops the film cold as she tries to explain everything that the film has been unable to make clear. Wild-eyed and more than half-crazed, she tries to bundle up all of the film's loose ends and make sense of them, but it's to little avail, I'm afraid: When I saw Hereditary, half of the audience was holding back snickers, while a few brave folks ventured loud guffaws. Then again, the twenty-somethings on my way out were already on the phone, telling friends, "I just saw the scariest movie ever." So, make of that what you will.
As borderline insane as Hereditary is, it is either smart enough or not brave enough to go really over the edge the way Darren Aronofsky did in last year's unhinged mother!, though toward the end it comes close. At its best, Hereditary is harrowing and even gripping, and at its worst, which is basically the last half of the film, it's sometimes howlingly terrible.
It gets off to a fantastic start: A newspaper obituary introduces a dead matriarch, and in short order we meet her grieving, not-exactly loving daughter Annie (Collette). Annie's marriage seems to be crumbling and whose children are having a hard time coping with what we gather has been a less-than-idyllic family life. They live in a rambling, perpetually underlit house out in the country, where Annie hand crafts creepy and disturbing miniature dioramas of her psychologically fraught family life.
Annie's husband (played by Gabriel Byrne) mostly leaves her alone, as do her son Peter (Alex Wolff) and seemingly sickly daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro). While Annie tries to make sense of her mother's death and the uncomfortable relationship they had, Peter and Charlie take off one evening -- and only one of them comes back.
The family descends further into crisis, and at this point, it looks as if Hereditary might base its horror on the genuine terrors of a dysfunctional family. As Annie cracks up and the family unit falls apart, Hereditary is on track to doing for intense grief what The Babadook did for depression or It Follows did for sexually transmitted diseases: to become a freakish and unsettling metaphor for a deeper emotional trauma.
But that's not what happens. Instead, Hereditary makes a sharp turn into something far crazier and far less interesting, and while I won't spoil exactly what that is here, I'll say that the movie's plot bears more than a little resemblance to the original Wicker Man and, most especially, to Rosemary's Baby.
That would be fine, but the two parts of the film never connect, and the film's big revelation is curiously uninteresting, if only because the movie's first half is so strong. It's quiet and confident, bearing a lot of similarity to The Sixth Sense, which also starred Collette (whose Oscar buzz seems, truth be told, more connected to her credit on this film as an executive producer than to her actual performance, which whiplashes between intelligent anguish and crazed screaming). There's nowhere the film could possibly go that wouldn't be fulfilling -- except where it does go, which is into a place so mismatched with where it started, that Hereditary falters and becomes eye-rollingly silly rather than shocking.
Ann Dowd, so good as Aunt Lydia in TV's "The Handmaid's Tale," comes into the film relatively late, and is asked to take on essentially the same character Ruth Gordon played in Rosemary's Baby, but there's something faltering about writer-director Ari Aster's take on things: both Dowd's pivotal character and the story as a whole lack the paranoid claustrophobia of the movie that serves as its inspiration (not to mention Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and M. Night Shyamalan's films).
What should be nightmarish is too often mostly silly, and also inexplicable: If you do see Hereditary, you'll probably wind up, like I did, going online afterward to figure out if others have deciphered the thing. Spoiler: They have, and those breathless write-ups ("the summer's scariest movie!" blares one) are vastly more entertaining than the movie itself.
But if you do wind up going to see it, do me a favor: Let me know what it is I missed in Hereditary, because I sense I missed a lot. Except the woman cutting off her own head. That I didn't miss. I just wish I had.
Viewed June 8, 2018 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks
2000
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