Hereditary (2018)

Official trailer

Hereditary is Ari Aster’s 2018 American indie horror and the director’s debut feature. The film depicts the Graham family in the wake of the grandmother’s death and the accumulating supernatural and psychological consequences that follow. Toni Collette plays Annie, the mother. Gabriel Byrne plays Steve, the father. Alex Wolff plays Peter, the teenage son. Milly Shapiro plays Charlie, the young daughter. Aster wrote the screenplay. A24 produced the film, and it was released in June 2018 after serious Sundance Film Festival attention.

Of all the horror films from the last decade, this is the one that rattles me most. The supernatural material is frightening enough, but what disturbs me is watching a family grieve badly, say unforgivable things to each other and keep living in the same house. Toni Collette’s performance alone would justify the 10, and Aster gives her a film worthy of it.

The film works as horror and as a study of family grief under supernatural pressure.

The work refuses the genre conventions that mainstream horror cinema typically deploys. The narrative organizes around the family’s accumulating breakdown instead of around dramatic supernatural confrontations. Aster builds dread slowly and saves his shocks for a few devastating moments. The work continues the international horror revival that earlier productions including The Witch had helped establish.

The Collette Performance

Toni Collette’s performance as Annie is among the great central horror performances in contemporary cinema. The character works as both grieving mother and as participant in supernatural events that the family doesn’t initially recognize. The actress establishes both tones through accumulated particular behavior. The dinner table confrontation, where Annie finally breaks, has taken on a life of its own since the film came out.

The dinner table scene is the reason I’d hand Collette every award going. She lets Annie say something that ugly across a table and still makes me understand exactly where it came from. That scene frightens me more than anything supernatural in the film.

The performance refuses the conventional horror heroine tone. Annie isn’t an innocent victim. The character carries distinct psychological history including family dysfunction, professional commitment to miniature art that works as both dramatic content and as broader argumentative material about control, and particular responses to her mother’s death that work at tones exceeding conventional grief. The result is a character who plays several tones at once instead of a single note. Horror leads can carry serious psychological complexity.

The First-Act Devastating Incident

Serious dramatic weight gathers around a devastating incident that occurs approximately forty minutes into the runtime. The incident transforms the family situation in ways that later sequences develop. The audience experiences the incident with the same shock that the depicted family experiences. The work refuses the conventional horror cinema approach that distributes shocking content across the runtime in measured dramatic peaks.

That incident knocked the wind out of me. I think it’s the boldest structural choice in modern horror, and Aster has the nerve to let everything after it live in that damage. Every scene that follows plays differently because I can’t stop thinking about it.

The structural design uses the first-act devastating incident as foundation for the wider work. All later sequences work against the established trauma that the incident produced. The audience can’t return to the pre-incident dramatic situation. The family can’t recover the relationships the incident damaged. The work argues that particular trauma produces permanent transformation instead of temporary disruption. Concentrated devastating incidents can carry argumentative weight that distributed dramatic peaks can’t match.

The Family Dynamic Foundation

Before any horror content arrives, the film establishes the Graham family dynamics with careful preparation. The opening sequences develop particular family relationships, individual psychological positions, and accumulated family history that the later horror content amplifies instead of creates. The structural design depends on this family dynamic foundation. The horror elements work through the established dynamics instead of against them.

The family dynamic foundation also produces particular argumentative content. The work argues that family dysfunction produces conditions that supernatural threats exploit instead of creating those threats from external sources. The depicted supernatural content emerges from family-particular history including the grandmother’s particular religious commitments. Horror cinema can develop arguments about family dynamics that work alongside the supernatural content.

This is what I admire most about Aster’s script. He spends real time making the Grahams a believable family before anything supernatural happens, so the horror lands on people I already know. Too many horror films rush that part, and I think it’s why so few of them stay with me.

Is Hereditary as good as people say?

Hereditary gets a 10 from me without hesitation. Collette gives a lead horror performance I’d put against anything in the genre, the first-act incident is the most shocking structural move I can name, and Aster builds the film on a family so real that the supernatural material feels like it was always waiting for them. If you care about modern American horror, or about Aster’s work, start here.

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