Some people have been talking about Ari Aster’s Hereditary as a horror film, which it is, sort of, in its second half. Once the movie turns to effects and weird coincidence and séances and kitchen objects shuffling around the table on their own though, Hereditary locks itself into a box of horror picture clichés it can’t escape. But the first part of the movie is about grief, and that’s the good part.
The film starts with a grandmother’s death, and right away there’s loneliness and dislocation. The two grandchildren are asleep and hard to wake; their mother Annie (Toni Collette) gives the eulogy to a very small gathering, and she describes her mother as secretive and unpleasant. The 13-year old daughter Charlie sits in a grim funk drawing nasty portraits of people around her.
When the four-return home, it’s to a big, comfortable place in the hills surrounded by aspens. You’d expect friends and relatives to keep them company after the funeral for some kind of gathering, but it’s just the four of them, walking into a house that’s dark, lonely and hollow. No one has much to say; they look overwhelmed by their grief. But something’s off kilter because you’ve just heard that Mom was not loveable. Something else must be going on, and whatever that is only gets worse because Charlie is gone a few minutes later in a bizarre accident with her brother Peter.
Then the heaviness really grabs. Annie, of course, is beside herself. There’s no relief; this family has no support, no extended family, no other people at all. It’s just trembling emptiness for them. Annie’s an artist who makes miniature houses like tiny dioramas. She builds a replica of Charlie’s accident that’s seriously grotesque, down to the headless, bug-eaten corpse. Otherwise, Annie can’t work. Peter (Alex Wolff), morose to begin with, sinks deeper into himself. He’s distracted at school; he barely moves. Steve the father (Gabriel Byrne) has no visible life at all.
This can all lead into horror film, yet horror movies tend to start with normality; the characters are carefree or playful, maybe irresponsible, so the horror can punish them for having fun or sex – or normality. Hereditary, doesn’t put out a second of fun. The scene is all unhappy and unsettled, but director Ari Aster has a good eye for it. When Annie’s not going for the grisly, she putters aimlessly in her studio; she wanders the house; she gets angry. She blames Peter for Charlie’s death. Then, she goes to a grief support group with about a dozen people sitting in motionless silence on folding chairs in what looks like an empty high school gym. You gasp at the dreariness.
The movie hasn’t left itself much room to grow, though. It has no feel for how to get out of this icy grim rigidity, and that’s when it takes its turn to horror. Annie runs into Joan (Ann Dowd), one of those people so full of blank-eyed cheeriness that you figure, or cynics may hope that she’s in league with the devil. The doormat outside her apartment reads a cloying, upbeat “Joanie,” and then you know that malice lurks beneath her surface.
But people hanging from the ceiling and upside-down shots are not what Hereditary needs at this moment. Instead of chilling or horrifying, the movie gets silly. Coincidences and paranoias pile up – and it turns out that Grandma isn’t even completely gone. And all the things and people who suddenly pop into the film make you wonder if the movie has got lost in itself, or maybe bored. It’s an empty show.
Going for the paranormal becomes a cop-out. When Hereditary lines up its characters at the end, the weirdness does not solve the story problems. The film just jumps the tracks. It’s like switching channels late at night when you’re half asleep – just as the episode of Law and Order gets to its trial, you find yourself at the end of Rosemary’s Baby.
