Hereditary review: Ari Aster's film doesn't shock but leaves you with an eerie feeling

It’s a movie that won’t scare you while watching it. A couple of days later though, it’ll creep up like you never expected. Ari Aster’s flawed feature debut is one to watch on the big screen. It doesn't even have more than a couple of jump scares throughout the movie but it’ll get under your skin, unlike most other horror movies.

It is a slow build-up but once you're in on the dysfunctional family, things get creepy real fast. You don't know what has hit you till you've had a chance to go home and fully think about what you just witnessed. It is a movie that doesn't leave you quickly and it shouldn't. A horror movie this isn’t, but a terrifying watch it is.

The comparisons to horror films - The Exorcist, The Shining and Psycho - of the past though, do the film absolutely no justice. It isn’t nearly as good as those horror gems but it is good in its own way. It’s genuinely terrifying. There was barely a couple of gasps from the audience throughout the screening.

What Hereditary caters to is an audience wanting something far darker. It’s aiming straight at your soul. Aster himself describes the movie as “a tragedy that curdles into a nightmare” and not a horror movie.

Just like in the recent film, A Quiet Place (a much better film to compare Hereditary with), the scariest part of Hereditary is noise. Specifically, the noise you make with your tongue. Charlie Graham (Milly Shapiro), a young teenage girl, makes the ‘click’ sound often enough (even when she’s not there) that it becomes increasingly unnerving.

Aster’s Hereditary wowed audiences and critics at the Sundance Film Festival. It is a film about a creepy dysfunctional family. Hereditary is centred around a mother who goes through loss and grief way more than the average mother has to deal with. Annie Graham (Toni Collette in an excellent lead role) has to deal with her surroundings as her grip upon the family, the place, and the world slowly loosen. Her emotional stress is tested to the limits.

Death is real to the Grahams. The more Annie decides to tackle the disorder head-on, the more she grows away from her husband. Don’t let the adult relationship get in the way of what is truly the heart of the story. It is the mother-son relationship that is the most frightening.

The problem with a film like Hereditary is that whilst the setup is intense and well done - both the style of filmmaking and the acting - it is the payoff that is more likely disappointing than not that you feel cheated in a certain sense. That is what derails the movie. Just don’t expect one of those truly unexpected endings.

The movie begins on a sober note. Annie’s mother Ellen has just passed away and it’s only at her funeral that we find out that she was a woman of “private rituals”. It is then that Annie begins to think that her life is crumbling. To talk about the specifics of the plot any more than this would be to do a disservice to the director and all the people that worked on this film.

There are certain scenes that creep up to you and can only be what is called a cinematic coup. We are set for more scares during the latter half of the flick. On the other hand, there were a lot of moments where I felt the plot prodding along and wondering when I was going to be genuinely scared. It’s about grief and guilt.

What Aster does, like in his short films of the past, is truly dissect the twisted family rituals.

What’s unnerving is the fact that most of the characters in the film, if not all, don’t know what to believe. There is a truly fascinating scene in the film when Annie tries to call the spirits. It is one of the few genuinely spine-tingling scenes. The emotions of the son, Peter (Alex Wolff) and husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) are as realistic as one can get in that scenario.

The characters increasingly give the impression that things are suffocation but the assured directing by Aster makes sure the audiences don’t suffocate. Something Jurassic World should take not off.

That, in the end, is truly what the film is all about. The cast. It is spot on. From Toni Collete to Alex Wolff, there is truly an air of distress and of one that is disturbing.

The scene stealer is none other than the grandma. The further we get away from her, the closer she gets to us. A week after the screening, I still can’t stop thinking about the grandma and her creepy ‘rituals’.

Let us not forget about the wonderful work of cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski. It reminds us of - though isn’t as great - as the horror films of the 1970s. There are wide shots, that take in not just the characters emotions, but its surroundings as well. There is the feeling that something in the background of the scene might just jump out at you. That unsettles the viewer.

Besides the cinematography, there is an almost devilish like score by Colin Stetson that sets up an atmosphere of anxiety that permeates throughout the picture.

Ann Dowd is superb in a small but crucial supporting role but the writers left her character underdeveloped. That is doing a disservice to her amazing acting talents. Just look at her role and fierceness in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Should you watch it?

Yes. The problem lies in the marketing of the film. You’re sold an outright horror flick but are served a terrifying 127-minute platter of a dysfunctional family and severed heads. That means the filmmakers don’t trust the viewers to truly enjoy a horror flick without the jump scares. The marketing does the film a disservice.

In the end, Hereditary isn’t a classic, nor is it truly original. On the other hand, it sure is above most of the horror fare that is being dished out these days. It’s worth your time for its stylistic substance and what lies beneath.

Rating 3.5/5