Halloween Movie Review: Hereditary
Written By Margaret Licup
CONTENT WARNING: This article contains mentions of suicide, gore and violence (it’s a horror film, what do you expect). It also contains a gory image showing a decapitated head and bugs on it (again, see point above). We do not recommend you reading the article if you are not comfortable with such topic or you are under the age of 15 as it could trigger negative emotions.
Always Dead Editor Reviews: Hereditary
Release Date: January 21, 2018
Written & Directed by: Ari Aster
Synopsis: Upon the death of the Graham family matriarch, her daughter — Annie — and her family — son Peter, 16, daughter Charlie,13, and husband Steve — attend her mother Ellen’s funeral as an attempt to posthumously make amends, uncovering cryptic and horrifying facets of their ancestry. With distrust and discord at every end, the Graham family fight as their harrowing fate grows ever closer.
[spoilers below]
Review: With the employment of visually vomit-inducing scenes, crippling sense of paranoia, and the general f*cked up content, director Ari Aster proves himself to be a master of the f*cked up parade in Hereditary.
The film contrasts the usual family-centred horror film in which a family usually goes through many ordeals and ends up with a happily ever after by showcasing complete communications breakdown and how the overall mental states of family members can lend a hand in all their deaths. The audience is displayed the domestic turmoil within the Graham family where their personalities, actions, or communication style fit like a flesh-constituted puzzle. A drug dealer son Peter, the dead-animal obsessed (and possessed) daughter Charlie, stressed father Steven, and the hysteric, traumatised mother Annie. In this puzzle, no pieces are made to fit. They’re only drawn together by the string of torture and hereditary fate.
The cinematography in Hereditary plays out as it would a dollhouse, undoubtedly a call to how the mother — Annie — is a miniature artist who creates dollhouses as a way to cope with her grief. It creates an inexplicable sense of being watched and monitored. Of being controlled. “They’re dolls in a dollhouse being manipulated by outside forces. Any control they try to seize is hopeless.” Aster says. Shots are slow, encroaching, and intrusive exercising the use of creeping zooms serving to heighten the overarching discomfort of Hereditary.
Hereditary’s colour scheme doesn’t shy away from doom and gloom either. Yellow-green — an indicator for discord, sickness, and corruption — is in almost every scene for a reason the audience determines later on in the film. Colours are saturated in mid-to-dark tonality, with undertones of blacks and greys that create the previously mentioned ‘dollhouse effect’ in light but with the absence of it, becomes incredibly dark. Rarely, is there an unmuted tone that doesn’t draw the positivity out of the movie but adds to the slow-paced horror.
Whilst underlying symbolism and increasing visual dread are one of the key aspects of the horrifying Hereditary, what makes it as terrifying as it is, is the graphic content that begins thirty minutes in. After Charlie unknowingly eats a cake with nuts in them that trigger her severe allergy, her brother Peter attempts to drive them home at unsafe speeds, swerves and accidentally decapitates his sister when she sticks her head out to breathe via telephone pole. This is only the beginning of the gore and horrors.
Distraught, Annie attempts a family seance to summon Charlie becoming possessed in the process. Her husband burns to death. Peter is a soon-to-be vessel of the demon Paimon. Her mother was a cult leader, her father died from schizophrenic starvation, her brother hung himself in his mother’s room after leaving a note saying that his mother tried to ‘put people in him’. With careful observation, the audience is keen to notice the cult members across the scenes watching. Waiting. Waiting for their plan to come to fruition.
Their entire life was a puppet show for the demonic cult that orchestrated all the events of the film. As Peter throws himself out of a window, the sound of a piano wire sawing his mother’s head off serves as the grisly ultimatum. There was no ‘winning’.
Overall: Hereditary is a slow-paced, but perfect movie to watch with your friends as you can spend the first half an hour getting ready with popcorn or chatting as the existential dread creeps in on you. I definitely needed to clutch my pillow on that last scene but maybe you can find a person (or people) to watch with you post-lockdown. What’s a better bonding experience?
I give Hereditary 8 decapitated birds out of 10.
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