Hereditary Review

An A24 indie horror film that got praise out of Sundance. That's literally all I needed to have "Hereditary" right at the top of my list of movies I was anticipating for 2018. Yeah, we'll get to our awesome ladies in "Ocean's 8" pulling off a jewelry heist eventually on this blog. I enjoy heist films and that movie has an amazing cast, so I'm down for it. But I absolutely NEEDED to see "Hereditary." BEFORE all the dumb people on the internet started calling it the worst horror film ever made. Because, you know, horror fans are worse than Star Wars fans. They'll go drool all over themselves during the 876th Paranormal Activity movie or the 6,783rd Saw movie, but the second an original horror film comes out that is genuinely creepy, is well made and has deep themes that leave you lost in thought for days, horror fans start calling it the worst movie ever made because there wasn't any jump scares or creepy monsters. Personally I like to call myself a REAL horror fan. I don't care for all the cheaply made, poorly acted, jump-scare riddled, cliche crap that litters the mainstream today. I look for the real stuff. It's often hard to find, but once I do stumble onto one, it makes the search so rewarding. And A24 is typically a really good source for this type of horror film.

As far as what "Hereditary" is about, yeah that's a bit tricky to talk about, especially with how amazing the marketing has been. A24 focused heavily on the buzz from Sundance to sell this film. That certainly worked for me and should be enough for others like me who appreciate the more unconventional or indie horror. I looked at the premise of the film and all I got was something about the grandma dying, which causes all these secrets from the past to be unleashed. That didn't tell me a lot. Neither did the trailer, which just compiled a whole bunch of disturbing, creepy imagery along with a lot of clicking and creepy music. So I had no idea what this movie was when I went into it, which actually had me excited going in because I was ready to be completely surprised by whatever the movie had in store for me. And surprised I was. Yet surprised might be a bit of an understatement because, when I wasn't expecting it, the movie snuck up behind me and metaphorically drilled me with a baseball bat in the back of the head. Then almost as if the movie was a crazy psychopath standing above me and laughing. After hitting me once, the movie drilled me again. And again. And again. The moment I thought my beating was over, yup, you guessed it, I got drilled again.

This experience went on for 127 minutes, which is the length of the film. When the movie finally let up by ending, I was left battered, bruised, bloodied and scarred. I saw this movie 40 minutes from my home because I was doing a friend a favor, which means I had a long drive ahead of me when it finished. I couldn't just sit in a corner with ice cream and cat videos after a quick drive home from the normal theater I go to. It was a long, grueling drive home and my mind was just messed up. Now that I've given myself a couple of days for the dust to settle, I look back on this experience and am genuinely impressed that a horror movie was able to do this to me. I've seen a lot of horror movies in my days, especially recently, and thus I've conditioned my brain to not lot horror movies affect me as much. I can love and appreciate a really good horror movie without having weeks worth of nightmares the second a monster jumps out of a closet, if you know what I mean. Even in the horror movies that I consider the best, I've rarely walked out of the theater feeling completely torn to pieces and utterly wrecked. But that's exactly what "Hereditary" did to me. It's like bragging that you love hot food only to be completely messed up one day when a friend secretly slips a ghost pepper into your food.

Fear is certainly an interesting thing and everyone is affected by something different, so I'll try not to talk this movie up too much in case you walk out not feeling scared and thus get mad at me because I promised a terrifying experience and you ended up being bored for the full two hours. I mean, I can have a friend share a picture or video of a bee with the explanation that they think it's the cutest thing ever, yet all my brain does is enter a genuine panic. In other words, don't hate me if you walk into this movie and don't get scared by it because maybe there's something specific about this movie that successfully got under my skin. It would be interesting to do a psychological analysis of all the specific behind that with this movie, but that's certainly not happening here because I don't even want to tell you what the premise of this movie is. All that I suppose I'll say is that it involves a family. A rather messed up family with an even more broken history. The husband and wife seem to have a great relationship, but the wife's mother, passes away before the movie even really starts and the wife feels zero remorse. The father seems to be the one grounded in reality to try to hold everyone together, but the older son is a druggie while the younger daughter is a creepy demon child.

Then things start happening. Specifically there's "a moment" in the film. A sort of trigger that spawns the rest of the movie. I'm not even going to hint at what it is, but I'll just say that the whole theater was stunned to silence. After a brief few moments, someone on the opposite side of the theater cried out, "Holy (expletive)!" And we all kinda laughed because that was the perfect expression about how we all felt. It was the shock value of the moment. The initial scene where I said the movie snuck up behind me and metaphorically drilled me with a baseball bat. Shock value is quite common in horror films. That's what most of them go for. But there's a difference between shock value just for the sake of shock value and nothing else and shock value that has a specific purpose to it. Oftentimes the difference is one comes from a studio-mandated horror film where the purpose is cheap scares randomly strung together on a cheap budget made specifically to earn a few quick bucks while the other comes from someone who has a specific idea of something greater and deeper. The scares for the latter are often not the specific purpose of the movie, but are there to serve the greater whole, and thus end up making the individual scares have more of a heavy impact.

"Hereditary" is a movie that's shrouded in secrecy. You know that there's a lot of secrets with the grandma and the family's past, but you have no idea what they are, thus the movie leaves you in the dark for a lot of the run time, which in turn leaves you very unsettled and uneasy as you progress forwards towards the ending. The only really major complaints that I have is that there are several scenes in the beginning where it's exposition-heavy. There's newspaper clippings that require a lot of reading or long conversations between two characters that are only there to give you a background to the story. I don't know if there was a way to fix that to make the initial narrative more smooth, but there may have been a thing or two that they could've ironed out. The other big complaint is that the movie was secretive that I had no idea what direction they were taking it and there were several times where I suddenly became nervous that the movie would let me down when/if they finally revealed the secrets. I had such a strong level of trust based on reactions from Sundance and from the fact that this was A24 that I was patient with the movie, but sometimes I felt myself a bit impatient as they were still holding secrets from me and I wondering if I was forcing myself to like it because it's A24.

Thankfully, though, my patience with the movie was rewarded with a second half that was absolutely insane, led heavily by Toni Collette as the mom and Alex Wolff is the older son. The progression of those two characters specifically were so fascinating, especially the mom. In terms of moms in horror films, Toni Collette's performance matches or exceeds that of Essie Davis in "The Babadook." That's the level of sheer brilliance that she pulls off. Horror movies usually don't get Oscar nominations, unless you're "Get Out" and you have a social commentary that hits the whole country on a personal level. But outside that, horror movies get ignored. Thus I'm not expecting Toni Collette to get her second Oscar nomination, but this would be a situation where it would be absolutely deserved. When we have the discussion when the year as over and Oscar nominations get dished out as to who should've deserved an Oscar, you can plan on me bringing up Toni Collette. She certainly gives the best performance from the first half of the year. I think in general, the family dynamic in this movie was so fascinating and the movie was gut-wretching and heavy because of what kept happening with this family. And that's as close to the line as I'm going to get in revealing this movie's secrets.

I suppose when you write this entire movie's premise down on a piece of paper and read it, it's possible that you could conclude that we've seen this before, but the execution of this movie was so flawless that said familiarity didn't even bother me. That may point to the idea that you don't have to be perfectly unique to be impressive. If you tread on the line of familiar, but you execute in the perfect way, then the movie still comes out feeling fresh. When it comes to checking boxes that I want from a horror film, this essentially checks all of them. It doesn't rely on cheap jump scares. It's story-driven. The acting is phenomenal. The movie makes you care deeply about all of the main characters. The score is absolutely perfect. The movie is genuinely creepy, but creepy isn't necessarily the main point of the film. I could go on. But when it comes to indie horror films, especially ones released by A24, this does exactly what I want it to do in terms of concept, yet had genuinely shocking turns as I had no idea what to expect. Giving a score to this is difficult because this is the type of movie where I need time to let it marinate over the months ahead to know exactly how I feel. But based on my initial traumatizing experience, I'm going to be bold and give "Hereditary" a 10/10.