Streaming Availability: HBO Max (now headless)
Note: I could write 5,000 words about this movie if I let myself go. I know these reviews are not short already, but Hereditary is maybe the single best film of the month, extremely interesting in a thousand ways. This is me trying to be concise.
There's an early scene in Hereditary where Peter (Alex Wolff) attends an English class in high school. Peter is a normal boy and would rather think about anything, - weed between periods, his classmate's ass - rather than the teacher's dull lecture on Oedipus. "Is it more tragic if it's inevitable than if the characters had agency?" is the question. Peter is not listening and nobody is impressed with his insights. Another student, otherwise important to the film, gives her answer. "I think it's more tragic - because if it's all just inevitable, that means the characters have no hope and that they never had hope, because they’re just like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine."
Nobody in Peter's family knows it yet, but that sloppy, mixed metaphor is exactly what they are: tragic and hopeless.
Hereditary does not use chess or machinery as a visual metaphor for the plight of its characters. Rather it sees them trapped in a dollhouse. The first scene is from inside Peter's mother, Annie's (Toni Collette) workshop of hyper-realistic miniatures. Annie pulls from her own anxiety for her art, so her work is full of recreations of their quiet Utah home. The camera pans around the pieces, before zooming into recreation of Peter's bedroom. Then in a seamless transition, the recreation has become reality. The sleeping doll-Peter is the real Peter, being awoken by his father, Steve (Gabriel Byrne) to attend his grandmother's funeral. From then on the family home is never 100% real. Rather it is always too neat, the shots too symmetrical, fourth walls in the staging too obvious. Of course, there is no home, no Graham family, they're actors performing their drama on a sound stage. They're posed and staged to give the illusions of life, yet they act out the tragedy that is Hereditary towards an inevitable ending of horror.
That name "Hereditary" does not conjure a vision of demons or Antichrists. There are enough nightmares in Annie's backstory that one would never need the supernatural to destroy her family. Her mother, father, and even brother all had mental illness, two have died in suicides. Annie and her mother have terrible history between them built on years of resentment, passing through phases of talking and not-talking, all ending with the burden of caring for an old dying woman racked by dementia. Worse, Annie has instinctively passed on these worst traits with her relationship with her two kids, Peter and the strange, quiet, possibly disabled girl Charlie (Milly Shapiro). There is the literal doom passed on because Annie's mother was a witch and her children are toys for the demonic. But also, the family is doomed by trauma and resentments that repeat endlessly.
Ari Aster would go on to make Beau is Afraid, a work even more opaque and hopeless than Hereditary. These are films where everybody's psychological destruction was set in motion decades ago. We can only watch the final disaster unfold. Ari Aster is not okay - his films only grow bleaker. I'd like to read a more liberatory and transformational subtext into his work, but Beau casts a very dark shadow. This all might just be torturous neuroses. There is no God, there is no therapy, there is only the Hell that is family.
Hereditary at least is a film that is less exhausting in its indulgence than Beau. It is a still a romp in a spooky haunted house - just a romp brought to an extremity of cruelty. This is a modernization of the occult tropes of films like Rosemary's Baby. We got a few ghosts and creepy chanting, that's fun horror stuff. We also get the worst nightmare a parent could ever imagine.
Instead of birthing an Antichrist, we're trying to nurture one. From the beginning, Charlie is an unsettling girl - I feel bad for this young actress since Hereditary makes her look so hideous. She already is the focus of mysterious strangers, and has a perverse fascination with decapitation. Charlie is well on her way to becoming something horrible.
That is until Hereditary pulls one of the most shocking first act twists in film history. I have never been more stunned by a movie than I was when I first saw this film. I do not think the theater breathed for an entire minute. You think Hereditary might hold back and not depict the results of the unbelievable scenario, but then it lingers on Charlie's mangled, ant-covered head for far too many seconds. The film is not just doing unspeakable violence to a child, but it is seemingly killing off its own blossoming villain. Every rule is shattered. Where could this be going now??
From here this becomes Annie's film. Toni Collette puts on the best performance of her lifetime as this prickly, often sarcastic and caustic woman, yet one carrying incredible pain. Hereditary has her screaming her guts out, across a montage of scenes, destroyed in a way I hope most of you have never experienced. Grief is at the center of all Aster's films, usually acute, unlivable grief. Some families can come together during such tragedy, Annie is torn from her husband and son by these circumstances. Even without a single spooky devil, this family was not going to recover for decades. Annie's only solace is found in an older woman, Joan (Ann Dowd), who opens the door to supernatural solutions. Little does she know that kindly, warm-eyed Joan is in fact the Minnie Castevet of this story.
The goal it turns out is to use Charlie's spirit as a medium to summon a demon named Paimon. My first thought was "who the heck is Paimon?" since even I had never head of him. It's a really deep pull. Paimon is listed as listed as one of the Kings of Hell under Lucifer in a few megical texts, such as The Lesser Key of Solomon and The Book of Abramelin. What's weird is that Paimon is not a Biblical demon like Azazel or Belial, or even has origins in any mythology I know of. This name "Paimon", appears mysteriously in the middle ages as a lord in Satan's system of feudal vassalage with seemingly no cultural context. He's depicted as a handsome youth riding a crowned-camel, which is why there is a trans subplot to Hereditary. Charlie has to be reborn, but not as a girl, Paimon needs a male body, Peter's body.
Hereditary allows the door to the spirits to be opened, yet there is no way to close it. Annie's best attempt to seal away the darkness backfires in a cruel defiance of the rules the film already established. There are horrifying scares towards the end, especially the brutal fate of so many characters. (I'm just going to pretend the family dog is just sleeping in the grass.) It is all the more intense since these characters had such depth to their relationships. Peter reverts to a little boy, sobbing in fear at multiple points. Steve grows colder and colder to his wife, trying his best but exhausted by her antics. Annie is pleading and sobbing about her love just minutes before Steve will burn to death and her floating corpse will saw its own head off. Nothing good is happening for anybody.
Except Paimon, I guess. The cult wins, indisputably. They have their perverse headless crowning ceremony. But it is impossible to read what expression is on Charlie-Peter's face. They seem to be in utter terror to me. These siblings have been transformed and evolved, gender-controlled, in ways it seems they never asked for. It's an imposition of a role upon them, a violation in every possible way by their heredity. And there is no escape.
Next Time! A movie even bleaker than this one if you can believe it, When Evil Lurks.
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