Shudder Sunday: Hereditary

Director: Ari Aster

Year: 2018

Genre: Horror, Drama, Mystery

Summary: After the family matriarch passes away, a grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences, and begin to unravel dark secrets.

5/5 Pineapples

Review:

BELIEVE

THE

HYPE.

"This generation's The Exorcist" couldn't be a more accurate depiction of Ari Aster's 2018 horror, Hereditary. The Exorcist blew audiences away in 1973 with its before-its-time sFX and grotesque imagery that no one had ever before dared to display on screen.

Ari Aster does exactly that by engulfing us in a dark story of a mother, Annie (played by Toni Collette of The Sixth Sense), with a troubled past who's coping with the death of her mother while raising two children of her own; a teenager, Peter (played by Alex Wolff of My Friend Dahmer) and a middle schooler, Charlie (played by Milly Shapiro), who seemingly has some sort of behavioral disorder. Annie was never close with her mother, and she fears what she may not know about her mother's personal life, as well as becoming anything like her.

Fear of becoming your parents? Relatable.

Ari Aster plays on that fear as he slowly unravels just how far Annie's dark past can go. With the help of Collette and Wolff giving the performances of their lifetime, we're taken on a bumpy, emotional roller coaster of "is this real or is this chick crazy?"

And, after the things that have happened to Annie and that do happen to her in just 2 hours and 7 minutes, who could blame her if she is?

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I want to kick start this review by addressing how many people have classified this as a slow-burn film. This baffles me because to anyone paying attention, the film is constantly progressing, building tension, and providing us with the keys we need to unlock what could possibly be going on in the building of this bizarre and uncomfortable climax...

The film begins with the funeral of Annie's mother. Right off the bat she describes how very little she knew about her mother's life and how close they weren't. She's wearing a necklace with a distinct symbol on it.

While Charlie is viewing the body of her grandmother, she's eating a chocolate bar that clearly has nuts in it, even though her family specifies she has a nut allergy. A man with bright blonde hair watches her over her grandmother's casket.

In a support group for people who have lost loved ones, Annie describes how her father suffered from severe depression, starved himself to death, and how her brother who suffered from schizophrenia would claim that his mother was trying to put people in his head before he too eventually killed himself.

Feeling like the only sane individual in her family, Annie distanced herself from her mother when she got pregnant with her son, Peter. Then, feeling guilty for pushing family away, she allowed her mother back into her life when she had Charlie. The grandmother bulldozed over Annie's position as mother, essentially raising Charlie as her own child, to the point where she even breast fed Charlie throughout her infancy.

Yuck.

Returning to a current time, Aster shows us through scenes of Charlie at school that she's not the most popular, sticks to herself, and has some violently morbid hobbies - like removing heads from pigeons.

Oh yeah, and there are also these weird runes carved into the headboards and walls of everyone's bedrooms inside their family home. No big deal.

Annie and the other members of the family are still coping with their current loss when a freak accident occurs.

Peter and Charlie go to a house party. On the way there, some members of the audience may not have noticed that a symbol was carved into a wooden telephone pole that they passed on the way in. The same one on the necklace that Annie was wearing at the funeral.

The raw horror that followed on their return home was enough to keep me up at night - and this is still in the beginning of the film. Charlie ingests some food with nuts in it at the party. When Peter finds her again, she's already struggling to breathe. He rushes her into the car and is speeding down the road towards the nearest hospital. She rolls down the window and sticks out her head in an effort to gasp for the slightest bit of air when her head makes contact with the telephone pole.

I don't know how anyone saw this scene and still left the theatre thinking this movie was anything less than disturbingly groundbreaking.

Charlie is dead. The individual I thought the film would essentially be all about. Gone. And her brother, who was present and responsible for her in the moment, is in medical shock. The scene draws out, bringing a very real emphasis on the discomfort, sadness, shock, anger, and fear, that a person is bound to experience in a circumstance as unfortunate as the one Peter finds himself in.

Not knowing what else to do he drives himself home and crawls into bed. When his mother discovers what happened the next morning, Peter is woken up by her blood curdling scream.

I am not a mother. I could never imagine what it may feel like to have a child of my own and then have that child taken from me - let alone taken from me in such a horrific way. That being said, Toni Collette's performance as Annie on her knees, gripping and pounding at the floor as she sobs, screams, and grieves for her lost daughter brought me hopefully as close as I'll ever have to be to understanding what it's like.

Haunted by so much trauma, Annie is grasping for ways to process the pain. She meets a woman, Joan (played by Ann Dowd of The Handmaid's Tale), at group who listens to her and who has also lost a young member of her own family.

When visiting Joan at her apartment one day, Annie notices Joan has a door mat "just like the ones [her] mother used to make."

Let it be known that all clues to the answer of the question, "what the hell is going on?" are found in what seem like throwaway lines/moments. So, if you're laughing or not paying attention, you're missing all of the complexities of the story that make this a deeply disturbing and successful horror movie. This, I believe, was the issue for those who were saying Hereditary was a slow-burn that didn't deserve all the hype. So, bear with me.

Peter is having a hard time at school while handling his losses and guilt. Annie's husband, Steve, is wondering why she goes out to "the movies" so often, when really she's going to these support groups or meeting up with Joan. Distrust is building in their marriage as Annie pulls away to grieve in her own ways.

During one of Annie's visits with Joan, she confides in her about the trouble at home and tells a story about a time she slept walk and almost set her children on fire. When she woke up, she was standing over them with a match in her hand. She says Peter never looked at her the same after that, and she believes that to be why she's having trouble connecting with him through this difficult time.

At this point, I'm like 80% sure this chick is crazy.

Later, Joan shows her a flyer for a church that claims they can teach you to speak with your lost loved ones. She convinces Annie to come back to her apartment so she can show her how it works. Annie feels extremely uneasy about the ritual that unfolds, but there's no denying that something did in fact respond to Joan.

Annie returns home and decides to try to summon Charlie's spirit. In order to do so, you have to place an item nearby that the spirit valued in life. Charlie loved to draw, so Annie uses a notebook of hers. She wakes up her husband and Peter to show them Charlie's spirit moving a glass. They think she's totally lost it until a candle lights itself and Charlie's voice starts coming from Annie's body as if Charlie's spirit has possessed it.

During this scene, I was SHAKING. I didn't think I could take much more right before Annie became herself again. Peter, terrified and upset, goes back to bed. Annie's husband seems to resent her for scaring Peter, amongst other things, and believes she was faking the entire experience.

A lot of things start to unravel all at once. Steve gets a call from the funeral home saying that his mother-in-law's grave was desecrated, her body removed, and now missing. He doesn't tell his wife. Charlie's spirit draws a ton of pictures of Peter in her little notebook of him with x's over his eyes while he wears a crown. Annie discovers a correlation between Charlie's notebook, a spirit, and Annie herself. Peter gets the crap beat out of him by something unseen while in class at school. When he gets sent home from school, he falls asleep, but is woken up later by what he believes to be someone trying to pull off his head. When he wakes up, Annie is standing over him. Peter's convinced it was his mother pulling on his head, but Annie says she ran in to check on him because he was screaming. We, as the audience, are unsure as to which perspective is true.

Oh yeah, and Annie discovers a headless body in the attic.

She calls her husband in a panic, and he comes home to scope it out, thinking she's completely deranged. Upon seeing the body for himself, he puts two and two together and asks her if she's the one who dug up her mother's grave.

At this point, I'm with her husband, and 98% sure she's crazy.

Freaking out, she tries to explain and defend herself. He doesn't believe her.

No husband ever does in a a horror movie. *eye roll*

She says she didn't dig up her mothers body, but she thinks there's a correlation between Charlie's notebook and herself. She thinks she woke up something that wasn't Charlie when she did the ritual the other night and the only way to get rid of it is to burn the book. She's pretty sure though that if she burns the book, she will also die.

When she tosses the notebook in the fire, fully anticipating herself to catch on fire, her husband bursts into flame instead.

In shock and terror, she's screaming and grieving for her husband, when all the sudden she deadpans and twitches. It's apparent she's no longer herself.

There's a shot of a scenery outside and there are a few people standing naked outside of their home.

I didn't notice this at first, myself, this was something that was pointed out to me later. That's how strategic and well-shot these kinds of moments are. If you're not fully focused, you'll miss moments like that one.

We find Peter asleep in his room. The shot is framed in such a way that you can see all the dark corners of the room. In the top left corner, you can see someone in a night gown perched against the upper wall and ceiling. When Peter wakes up, we see the same mysterious figure float outside his bedroom into the hallway while he's looking the away.

Peter walks out of his room to search the house for his family. There are naked strangers lurking in the dark corners of nearly every shot that Peter isn't aware of. When his mother, clearly overcome by something evil, begins chasing him. He runs to the attic, only to be trapped with his headless grandmother's decrepit body and a few more naked strangers who are swarming around him.

But they're not all strangers, are they? The blonde man that was at Annie's mother's funeral in the beginning is one of them. Joan is another.

His mother is then seen hanging from the lofted attic ceiling from her neck above him, sawing away at her neck with whatever wire has her hung there.

With the strangers surrounding him, he chooses to leap out of the window. We see his soul leave his body. Something else takes a hold of him while we watch Annie's headless body float into Charlie's tree house.

The film ends in Charlie's tree house with the naked individuals chanting alongside the headless bodies of the grandmother, Charlie, and Annie that are laid out in a permanent bow before Peter. The look in his eyes confirms that this isn't the same Peter we've been watching up to this point. A crown is placed upon his head as the living individuals chant, "HAIL PAIMON!"

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So, here's the short version: Annie's mother was also the birth mother of a demon worshiping cult, and her mother conspired against her family from the beginning to benefit her own dark desire to summon the demon, Paimon, from the underworld.

The runes and symbols we catch glimpses of throughout the film were the cult's witchcraft that essentially drove particular events to happen to particular members of the family.

The door mat we saw in front of Joan's apartment, was a clue to us that Joan knew Annie's mother personally.

Charlie was Paimon all along, but Paimon prefers a male host.

I read a theory that Paimon was trying to sabotage Charlie by eating the nuts she was allergic to when they're at Annie's mother's funeral.

The members of the cult were the ones who desecrated Annie's mother's grave and stashed her body in the attic.

My biggest question was, "What's with everyone losing their heads?"

This article did a great job at clearing up that question for me. It also explains why Paimon needed a male host and why all of this death and decapitation was necessary for Paimon to survive in our world. Anything I'd add about the subject would simply be a reiteration of what I read here.

It's worth noting that many scenes in Hereditary were shot in such a way that it appears there's something lurking in the corners. This created an overall sense of unease throughout the entirety of the film. Towards the end, when there truly were beings in the dark corners of these shots, it only confirmed the fears that were festering in our chests from the beginning.

The traumatic moments being drawn out and focused on a single character's face allowed us to really process the expressions the characters made and the emotions that they were confronted with.

These two facts alone about how the film was shot and executed, are enough to make the film legendary, in my eyes. Tie in the incredibly twisted and deep backstory that ends with a cult successfully summoning a demon into our reality and crowning him their leader - and we've got ourselves a masterpiece.

At the very end of the film, we are left with more unease than we started with. And, if that's not the exact point of a horror movie, I don't know what is.

If, despite all of that, you still think Hereditary is a bad film... well, then you probably thought Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was a good film.

*sips tea*