It has been roughly twenty-four hours, and even now I still feel psychically dizzy from yesterday’s viewing. What I witnessed in that darkened theater simply should not work. Even when a part of me resists the earnest magic trick that first time director, Ari Aster has just pulled on audiences like me, it cannot be understated that HEREDITARY, is indeed the goods critics have praised it to be. Not merely content with playing the now-expected A24 affinity for then-contested films like THE SHINING, this exploration into the often unspoken rot at the core of the well-to-do American family, is a deep burn-making harrow machine with a clear-headed reverence to the classics of the genre.

It opens with the local obituary of one Ellen Graham, 78. Having been mostly bedridden in hospice with her relatively famous minitaturist daughter Annie(Toni Colette, in one rollercoaster performance), her husband, David(Gabriel Byrne), teenage son, Peter(Alex Wolff), and 13 year old daughter, Charlie(Milly Shapiro). Her passing due to cancer, has left the family with a basket of complicated feelings, particularly with Annie, who’s relationship with her mother was clearly both mysterious and contentious. And it is the divide between her roles of both daughter and mother, that we begin to take in just how much living with such a difficult matriarch in their house over Ellen’s final days, led to some simmering doubts and resentment that has quietly infected the entire family. Like a scab that has been removed, the mess is evident, and without proper addressing, could infect everything.

As mentioned, the Graham family seems to have been harboring some unspoken troubles prior to the eldest’s passing whilst living in an idyllic house in the Utah mountains. Annie’s life as a figure in the fine art world, tends to have her tending to her projects; specifically almost one-to-one miniature recreations of reflections from her life. And what we see over the film tends to serve as both exposition, and window into her thoughts and memories. Again, it is pretty clear in these that plenty remains unresolved until she sneaks into town to attend a grief counseling group where she admits to a legacy of mental illness that has long affected her bloodline. Incapable of reconciling with this, plus a creeping feeling of guilt without clear pinpoint comes bubbling to the surface. Her husband, David’s patience and understanding being perhaps the one element of solid anchoring she has. And then come the children, beginning with high schooler son, Peter who longs for his independence, but is evidently in a strained place with his mom. Lastly, is the delicate, quietly strange Charlie, who spends her time making sculptures out of random objects, draws, and lacks social grace. Annie’s mothers favorite, who’s world has been entirely upended by her grandmother’s death. The problems have clearly been unaddressed for some time, and now that a protective layer is gone, HEREDITARY is about that scramble for normalcy, when in fact nothing in most families is normal.   

And now this is the part where I have to stop and say that from here on, the review has to change gears. Even the above paragraphs I have shared might prove too much. What Aster and his crew have done, is both taken the age-old family drama dynamic, and somehow melded it with classic slow burn horror mechanics with a post-horror sheen and ambiguity. And while it may not play the same way with those familiar with the genre’s history, there is indeed something at play here that hasn’t really been done since possibly Peter Medak’s 1980 paranormal horror, The Changeling. And while even this isn’t a good enough hint as to what is happening, starting here and considering A24’s penchant for the quietly unsettling has probably always been headed in this direction. HEREDITARY, feels both very new, and yet remarkably knowing of its place as post-modern spook fest. It’s the kind of unique moviegoing experience you want to go in ice cold on.  

“Why was I born?”

The real, potentially lasting impact of HEREDITARY, is most likely going to be its almost unearthly caliber of performances, and memorable imagery. There is some indelible work here by the two children who perhaps bear the greatest burden in what is happening in the Graham home. Shapiro’s natural strangeness and grit, make her an instantly memorable presence throughout the entire piece. And this is via such sparse amounts of dialogue, one would swear we’ve all known her at some point in our lives. But the real revelation, is Wolff who’s youthful will to defy is mere dressing for something that inevitably leads to one of the most wrenching explorations of unchecked trauma I have probably ever seen. Byrne, grants the film a warmth and gravity to the proceedings as a man, simply doing the best he can to help everyone find equilibrium. And yet, this is truly Collette’s show as a mostly reluctant mom who’s world largely seems haunted by family on all sides. The film becoming a prism of these once dormant feelings, now allowed to run rampant. With the Graham house as a meticulously designed and lit reminder of the power of staging. Probably not since Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s super dated, yet brilliant PULSE, has a film so assuredly utilized silent film techniques to sell dread in such sumptuous heaps. The combined talents of Grace Yun, and Pawel Pogorzelski, are a haunting powerhouse.

Grief and trauma, two cornerstones of the horror experience, find themselves cleverly used here to sharp effect. Exploring what they are, and can be for both families and society, seems to lie at the heart of this film. If there are screenplay cheats regarding theme, they lie in a number of classroom scenes that evoke greek gods, civilizations and families long gone, often undone by a feeling of living within an inescapable game. Like a family with an abusive past, we too can find ourselves at the behest of forces bent on manipulating our fates for some selfish end. We may wish to rise and do our part to undo these chains, but the cost may at times be too frightening to consider. HEREDITARY delves into the possibilities of why we sometimes never bother addressing the the reality of our situations.

Possibly the scariest thing imaginable, reality.