About two-thirds of the way through Hereditary, I was momentarily pulled out of the all consuming psychological horror of the film. In the real world, sitting in the stunned darkness of a Manhattan screening room, my legs were hurting. For a brief, terrible moment, I thought some demonic horror from the screen was affecting my actual body. Then, I realized, I’d been tense for the last 80 minutes, and my legs were sore from shaking. I was sitting in a movie theater, literally quivering like a small child.
The last time I can remember feeling that way in the middle of a movie was hiding under a blanket while watching The Sixth Sense as a kid. I was nine years old, and I was at an age where I thought I could handle the movie that all the cooler kids were talking about. I was wrong. I couldn’t sleep for a month, and, even years afterward, I’d still get that feeling in the middle of the night that a dead woman would be walking down the hallway. In a fort, at a birthday party in the middle of the day, The Sixth Sense taught me no place was safe from fear, especially from the crippling emotional fear of a cerebral horror.
I once again felt like my own will had betrayed me after seeing Hereditary, a movie that left me so shaken that when I got home to an empty apartment, the creaking of the house and the sounds of voices upstairs were no longer ambient Brooklyn noises. They were sound effects of an atmosphere that Hereditary had trapped me in.
But let me be clear: Hereditary isn’t non-stop ghost action. It's more like a psychological thriller established, at first, as a family drama–but one that very carefully builds the tension and anxiety to unbearable levels until something completely terrifying happens on the screen.
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Toni Collette (in a fabulous, Oscar-worthy performance) plays Annie Graham, an artist who's grieving the death of her her complicated, estranged mother. As she explores her own ancestry and her mother’s bizarre customs, strange things start happening to the family in their remote house in the woods—particularly surrounding her daughter, Charlie (played by an unnerving Milly Shapiro), who was particularly close with her grandmother.
After a second family tragedy that threatens to disrupt Annie's already tenuous relationship with her loved ones, she searches for answers for her grief and emotional madness—all while bizarre occurrences (spooky visions, visits from strangers, seances) continue to create a paranoid, unsettling atmosphere that erupts into full-throttle terror in the film's final act.
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All of this is largely thanks to Collette, whose performance isn’t dependent solely on delivering a believable scream (which she absolutely pulls off), but rather in channeling the complex emotions her character must wrestle with after the death of a mother she never fully loved. Annie tries to raise her own children within the shadow of her own upbringing, and to keep her marriage to Steve (Gabriel Byrne) from collapse. She hides away in her workshop, literally obsessed with building miniature models of her past at the expense of the relationship with her daughter Charlie and her son Peter (Alex Wolff), who’s just trying to be a normal teen.
Hereditary is full of tiny details that will haunt your waking life long after the end credits roll.Hereditary never lets the viewer feel comfortable. The film is full of tiny details—an ever-shifting evil, a shocking twist half-way through the movie, an agonizing score by saxophonist Colin Stetson, the moist clucking of a tongue—that will haunt your waking life long after the end credits roll.
But it's also a film that examines how a mother’s past can haunt a family long after her death, proving that the sins of our parents have lasting effects on our own psyches. The pain and the demons in Hereditary aren’t only literal; they’re the same ghosts that torture families struggling with grief. The realism, the death, the pain, and the genre fantasy of Hereditary are nearly impossible to separate. It continues an approach to filmmaking has been behind a recent resurgence in the horror genre, from Jennifer Kent's The Babadook to Robert Eggers's The Witch.
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That’s the power of film like Hereditary, in which the scares aren’t haunted-house jump thrills, ridiculous gore, or over-the-top CGI. This is an atmospheric horror: The moments that aren’t scary are just as agonizing as the demons in the frame. It’s a movie that conflates the feeling of grief with the paranormal. The horror is real as anything else we can experience in the real world.
Truly the biggest shame about this movie is that it’s very good, but I don’t think I can ever see it again. Which is okay, since I’ll be watching it in my nightmares for years to come.
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