Hereditary

🎥 Succint Overview

Hereditary (2018), which anchors ari aster’s directorial debut, is a psychological horror that turns grief into something something evil and mythic. Tone and pacing do wonders to the atmosphere, building and releasing tension like a vice. The film’s setting highlights the rot in the family tree, where everything is inherited but isn’t purely genetic, it is also a curse.

Annie Graham (Toni Collette), a miniature sculptor, is a shell of a woman who simultaneously juggles being a mother. The unraveling starts with her secretive, estranged mother Ellen dying. Towards the latter half of the film, Annie is shown to emotionally unhinge herself pick at her family’s abyss they resent. In her family, she is met with Steve (Gabriel Byrne), who aids in maintaining his stoic nature, her son Peter (Alex Wolff) who grows distant and her daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) who shows hints of strangeness during her early years.

Life isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, sudden and brutal shifts do happen.

From here, it transforms into a spiral. The aesthetic transforms to reflect Annie’s growing obsession with occult healing, as gradually the forces she fails to grasp begin to unravel. This attempt to reconnect with the dead spirals into nightmare. Family members are dominated with manipulative, death-bound ritualistic legacy that tore their reality apart.

The more information Annie uncovers, the more disturbing it becomes. Her mother was part of a coven, a lineage of ancients worshippers that sought to resurrect something powerful. And the Grahams… they were merely vessels.

🌟 Lead Performances

Toni Collette as Annie Graham – Collette delivers a performance for the ages. The rawness of her grief, fury, acute rage, and madness was brutal and shattering alongside her dinner table confrontation with Peter, which is arguably one of the emotionally most intense moments in modern horror.

Alex Wolff as Peter – Wolff captures teenage guilt and fear with remarkable precision. The agony of coming face to face with the psychological hell they’ve been plunged into is heartbreaking, but the empathy soon fades when the viewer witnesses the true extent of terror awaiting them.

Milly Shapiro as Charlie – Shapiro makes Charlie unforgettable. She is uncanny in her likeness to Charlie (which is enhanced by superb authentic looking make-up) from header material, and her legacy looms long after she’s gone.

Gabriel Byrne as Steve Graham – A calm storm of concealed turmoil. The emotional exhaustion from disbelieving the pure chaos unraveling around him is achingly familiar.

🖋️ Themes and Mood

Hereditary has an undertone of trauma, grief, and legacy. Beyond a horror film, it’s considerate study of familial trauma, grief, and legacy processes and will send a chill down your spine in the best kind of way.

The themes subasively make their way into the main story:

Inherited doom – Cycles (globally) tend to get passed down from generation to generation, much like secrets, and taboos. The film touches on how one generations need rituals, sins, and secrets mentally and how it ends up entrapping the next generation.

Mental illness as horror – At the core of each Humans existence blurs the line with the supernatural and everything makes for horror. From the perspective of Annie, is she going insane or is she simply seeing the only truth that exists?

The denial of control – In an utopian universe, the characters attempt to pick eachother and deny the horror encapsulating them, attempt to rationalize and protect alongside the justification of repetition.

The overarching feeling in this is bleak, uncomfortable, and relentless. Aster forges silence as a way of suspense, accompanied by the score of Colin Stetson slowly awakening ancient forces: creaking and howling. Everything amalgamated distorts the audience into a suffocatingshocking feeling.

📝 Conclusion

For the audience of Hereditary (2018) what seems to be scary in the dark is nothing but horror that looms over silently and eternally. It resides from unexplained and undiscussed trauma we are born into while being effortlessly and quite without notice controlled devoid of any consent.

The culmination is accompanied by a morbid ritual with no bittersweet triumph but with awe — revelation.