Hereditary

Comparisons with Rosemary’s Baby, Psycho, and The Exorcist create expectations that Hereditary can never live up to. But the film will still send shivers down your spine and it will still be giving you chills a week later.

Is Hereditary the scariest film in years, as the hype would have us believe? Don’t let anybody else decide for you. Our view is that it is an above-average, chilling, and unpredictable horror sensation that is so cleverly and villainously put together that you would never believe it was made by a debutant. Remember the name because we will be hearing from Ari Aster again, and don’t mistake the horror label because you don’t have to love the genre to be deeply impressed for a long time by this film.
Hereditary is a descendent of Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now and it also refers to those kinds of chilling classics, but it is by no means a carbon copy. You don’t see any of the twists coming and the Psycho moment is a total shock.

Scared for weeks

We can’t give away too much about the story because we don’t want to spoil it. A family with two children is wracked with grief after the grandmother’s death. The eccentric Charlie (revelation Milly Shapiro) starts acting more strangely than usual and makes crafts with the cut off heads of pigeons. Her brother Peter (Alex Wolff) couldn’t care less about her. Their father Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is too tame for words. It is only the sleep-walking, doll-house obsessed mother Annie who goes to extremes to figure out what kind of evil is affecting her family and where it came from. Toni Collette gives her best performance since The Sixth Sense, as long as you can put up with the fact that her expressionism is sometimes a little campy.

This film does not have very many jump scares, but the ones it does have are right on point, as is the alienating soundtrack by Colin Stetson. The uncomfortable, oppressive atmosphere gets worse and worse with each new scene. But by the time you realize what kind of slow-acting poison you are dealing with, it is much too late and you will be terrified for the rest of the night and much of the next week. Wonderful.