Annie is devastated: not long after her erratic mother Ellen died, her daughter Charlie (13) is decapitated in a freak car accident when the car was driven by her brother Peter (16). Annie and her husband Steve try not to blame Peter, but strange things keep happening in their house. Annie is caught sleepwalking at night, and contacts Joan, a woman who teaches her how to ostensibly summon the ghost of Charlie. Steve thinks the ghost summoning seance is nonsense. When Annie discovers her mother's dead body in the attic, covered with Satanic symbols, she throws Ellen's book into the fire, and Steve burns out in a flame. Annie is possessed by a demon and attacks Peter. The demon crosses into Peter's body, where Joan and other demon-worshipers worship him in the treehouse.
Ari Aster's feature length debut film is an effective psychological drama, at first coping with the issue of Annie losing both her mother and her child, and is thus symbolically suddenly left without her legacy and her future, yet slowly morphs into a different kind of genre, the one of a horror, which is not that effective since it rehashes some already seen motives from "The Witch" and "Rosemary's Baby", failing to create something new. For all the hype surrounding it (some websites reported exaggerated stories of audiences being so scared by the film that they fled the screenings), "Hereditary" is rather calm in its first hour, even boring save for the two unpleasant-eerie moments (Charlie using scissors to chop the head of a dead pigeon; only for her losing her own head when she sticks it out in a speeding car), whereas its inspiration is not that high and is burdened by stale dialogue. The final 30 minutes are were the movie engages the most, since the suspense really kicks in, abounding with some scary moments (Peter spots a reflection of a light traveling across the hall), except that the plot twist near the end is not that well prepared: some of the characters seen early on were on it the whole time, but it was not that well shown, making the ending seem almost abridged, though it does connect to the element of split personality, indicating that some of the characters already showed signs of demonic possession. Two undoubtedly great plus points are the two main actors: excellent Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne as the married couple stuck in a series of bizarre paranormal events, and their performances are top notch.
Grade:++
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