HEREDITARY
★★★½
Toni Collette in a scene from Hereditary.
Photo: AP
MA, 128 minutes
Most modern horror films, at least those given more than a cursory local cinema release, are content to go through the motions rather than trying to inspire authentic dread. So, all hail Hereditary, from American writer-director Ari Aster, which is not only genuinely creepy but one of the best first features I've seen in a while.
Centred on a troubled family in an old, dark house, the film draws from the same well of occult mumbo-jumbo as recent hits such as The Conjuring or Insidious, but invests this hokey material with a pained, personal intensity. Aster may not literally believe in the supernatural, but he certainly believes in the kind of psychological damage which (as his title implies) can be handed down from one generation to another.
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There are three generations here, though only two are immediately visible. The story begins with the death of Ellen Tapir Leigh, the 78-year-old matriarch of an upper-middle-class family living in a spacious house in the woods.
Her surviving relatives are her daughter Annie (Toni Collette), an artist who builds dioramas that resemble dollhouses; her older, reserved husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne); their easygoing teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff); and Peter's younger sister Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who follows in her mother's artistic footsteps by sketching grotesque portraits in a notepad.
As we gather from Annie's eulogy, Ellen was a difficult and controlling woman, akin to a domestic tyrant in a Victorian novel. The other family members, except perhaps Charlie, have at best mixed feelings about her death. The force of her personality looms over the whole film, though we find out only gradually how her legacy has been passed on.
Gruesome things begin happening in Hereditary quickly enough, yet the film is a slow burn, using the conventions of horror as a route to evoking a mood that's uncanny in a more individual way. This mood is defined in large part by the house, with its sickly green walls, polished floorboards and exposed ceiling beams: a desirable piece of real estate, yet not somewhere you'd actually want to live.
The dream logic that operates here can be grasped intuitively long before the overt plot starts to make sense. The house is a prison for its inhabitants, as if they had been shrunk down and enclosed in one of Annie's dioramas. This, in turn, is a metaphor for the structure of the family, which controls the characters regardless of who they are as individuals, point underlined a bit too firmly by a discussion of Greek tragedy in an early classroom scene.
The same idea is dramatised more effectively by Aster's visual style, always distinctive and carefully thought out. Oppressive close-ups alternate with wilfully detached wide shots, often showing the actors in full figure so they occupy the middle portion of the frame, with space above and below. They look like dolls in a dollhouse – or actors on a set, which is what they are.
The appearance of artificiality and constraint stands in contrast to the realistic performances – realistic, that is, when you consider how people might really behave under such extreme circumstances.
Collette, never afraid of bold choices, goes through some of the most outlandish facial contortions this side of Laura Dern in Inland Empire. As for Wolff, it's rare to see a young male actor allow his character this kind of vulnerability – not in a calculating, winning way, but weeping and shaking with fright.
The paradox of Hereditary is that a film seemingly cut off from everyday experience nonetheless pushes buttons very close to home. The packed screening I attended was filled with the one sound that proves a horror movie is doing its job: the nervous laughter that comes in waves over an audience unwilling to believe it could get so caught up.
Given that this is being hyped as the most frightening film in eons, I should confess my own response was more pleasurable excitement than outright, abject terror. Yours, of course, may differ.
What is it, for each of us, that flips the switch in our brains? The solution to the mystery is necessarily personal: perhaps it depends on the particular things that happened to us as children that we do not want to recall.
Jake Wilson was born in London and grew up in Melbourne. He got his start reviewing movies for various websites and has been writing for the Age since 2006.
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