Hereditary (film): it would be ok if it made sense
This is a supernatural horror film with plenty of creepy scares - mostly jump scares but other, more meaningful dread scares. A lot of them are actually quite good but the story is so convoluted that it is difficult for me to fully get behind this film.
This movie just is going in so many directions at once and there are certain scenes that are just so poorly written that it is hard to watch. It also contains some of those time-wasting scenes and the normal idiocy that happens in horror films all too often: One person sees something incredible that if the other person would just go up the friggen stairs and LOOK at what the other person is talking about the entire thing could be resolved. Eventually they do go, but not before having a 10 minute useless diatribe with the other person about how "you need professional help," etc.
Toni Collette is a woman (named Anne in the film) who specializes in making custom dollhouses and other small replica items. She also specializes in having this look on her face and pleading with people to believe her.
It seems strange to me that there are certain times in the movie that she absolutely refuses to believe any of the crazy-sounding stuff that other people say (sometimes even laughing at them) despite the fact that she spouts off plenty of crazy on her own throughout the movie. Hypocrite much?
The rest of the main cast does a pretty good job as far as acting goes but there are portions of the script that are so poorly written that even having a legendary actor like Gabriel Byrne in the movie couldn't rectify it - and to be fair he is not really in a great deal of the movie. There is one particularly long scene, that i would imagine it was difficult to film, that the word "please" is said by Anne no less than 40 times in 2 minutes. It is just hard to watch.
The movie takes so many impractical and unexplained turns that when the shock ending is presented to you, not only do you not understand how it is that we got here, or why, but you don't even care. The movie definitely is scary, there is no doubt about that. Using heart rate monitors on test audiences they attempted to prove it is the scariest movie of 2018. I'm in my 40's and i turned the lights on for the 2nd half of the film.
All this doesn't change the fact that the movie doesn't make sense, lacks in continuity, and a lot of the dialogue is just dumb.
This movie suffered a massive disparity between official critic reviews and review scores made by the general public. There is such a noticeable difference between the two that there has been some chatter about how it is suspected that the critics were (and continue to be) paid to give positive scores by this studio as several of their other films have experienced the same phenomenon.
"the story is so convoluted"
Yes, absolutely.
I haven't read the critics on this yet, so I'm not sure why they like it so much. At a guess, they are seeing echoes of other top filmmakers. But for me, this is nowhere near as eerily controlled as Kubrick's "the Shining;" this is nowhere near as psychological as Polanski's "Repulsion;" this is nowhere near the steady steadfastly mounting horror of John Carpenter's "Halloween;" this has nowhere near as the fascination and disgust for the underbelly as David Lynch (despite the ants lol).
On the positive side, this is nowhere near as audience unfriendly as Darren Aronofsky's "Mother" which faked that it was horror, was actually a disguised Bible story.
It is not just that the story is convoluted, which it is, it is that the movie never gets us to care about any character. Is this the story of a mother grieving her mother? Or a son traumatized for other reasons? It starts as the former, becomes the latter, then goes any which way, until the audience feel thoroughly dicked around, and not in a good way.
All the filmmakers I mentioned above would have exerted a more complete and all-consuming directorial control over the material, in my view.
Ari Aster tells us in the first shot what his game is: he is Mr Metaphor. We look out the window at a tree-house, which is the focus of our attention, only to turn around to discover the real house is a literal dollhouse (cos there is a real person sleeping inside an itty bitty doll house inside the actual house). And the whole shebang seems sustained to treat the characters as dolls from scene to scene.
While it is a clever enough metaphor that people can be dolls, manipulated in their fate, it's also pretty one-note, and it's so forcefed to the audience, that we lose our bearings about who to care about. Toni Collette's mother seems sympathetic until she's too freaky; her daughter the same, her mother the same, her husband too passive, and her son, well the infantilized way he calls her "mommy" and constantly cries and freaks out, squanders his potential to be our "in" to the story also.
We just don't know who to watch, or what to care about, and the filmmaker's constant doll metaphor suggests we probably shoudn't bother anyway.
Weirdly, the stuff I liked best was the freaky Japanese horror style sudden movements behind characters, as well as Toni Collette's and the whole cast's empathetic performances.
Putting all this aside, there is one standout sequence in the movie, involving the son driving a car, in which the filmmaker thoroughly succeeds in putting over his ideas about dolls and fate, and the reason it works so well is the completely credible sequence of events that gets us there, from teen parties, and unwanted tagalongs, and bongs, and girls, and it's just so well done, the way one thing leads to another. The culmination in a close-up of the son's face is a tour de force. This is Stephen King type thematic goal scoring, in it's evocation of the threat and malevolence lurking behind ordinary people and events. A total winner of a scene that saves the movie. :)
fan friggin tastic. I read every word of that. Well done!
I watched it yesterday and let me just say that I like all horror movies.. campy, gory, jump scares, etc.. I just know what I'm watching and go into it with the right mindset.. however I believe that this movie is imo a true horror film to the core.. I mean the family tragedy that takes place in the film drowns you in dread and agony for the rest of the film and that's before the horror aspect of the movie really starts to kick in. It is a slow burn which never usually bothers me but this movie almost lost me at a certain point until it finally drug me back in which is my one and only complaint. Other than that though, the cinematography and imagery, the score, the fucking top tier acting, and just the skillful execution by the director make this not just a good horror movie but a good film in general.. I would say don't go into this movie with the mindset that you're gonna see "the scariest movie ever"... go in to this movie with an open mind set and be prepared for a good story and character development, do that and the horror will hit you at the right moments..
I am not agree with you this time. I think this movie is really interesting and the horror it gives is really deep, not as you said "jump scares". The silent moment when the mother creeps behind her son is unique. The movie have a real idea.
The only thing that annoyed me was that for me there were little similarities with "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" and "The Witch". But still it is the best horror film I have watch after "The Witch".
Here is some explanation about the movie that I think it will be useful to understand the whole concept:
I don't expect people to agree with me on everything. It would be a boring world if we did that. :)
The main secret of "Hereditary" is that this film is not at all what he is trying to pretend. This movie is sold as a story of ghosts terrorizing a provincial family. In memory, immediately pops up a lot of pictures about the "bad houses", under the string stuffed with all sorts of mysticism and "bu-moments." Almost all of these horrors are built on the idea of paying for sins - the characters have done something terrible in the past, and now otherworldly forces revenge them for their bad behavior.
Recently, it has been customary to talk about the renaissance of the horror film genre, in which five years ago, nothing interesting happened. It seems to me that many successful horrors of recent years are fairly intercepted. The nostalgic "It" is nothing more than a prudent studio project that crosses "The Breakfast Club" and "A Nightmare on Elm Street," however cute it looks, so empty inside the movie, in which there is not a single fresh thought. The recent "A Quiet Place" is a formal exercise: spectacular and skilful use of exactly one technical technique. "Hereditary" on their background looks like a poor relative with a much smaller advertising budget. But it is her, I'm sure, after a dozen years will be remembered as a reference example of the horror of the 10th - the most talented and ultimately most terrible.
Hiii...gooddream
Great Post
Horror movies are always awesome. I often watch these movies at night. Thanks for sharing the movie. I always learn about some new movies from your every article.
Oh men how I fear horrors I have to watch it during day
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Good review...sadly, horror is a lost art. I do however have faith/hope in the new Halloween movie. Hoping that having Carpenter involved will at least keep things going in the right direction.
A few days ago I was going to see this movie, I ended up deciding not to do it, I preferred to see another one. I liked knowing your experience about this movie.