Horror movie Hereditary arrives on Maltese screens on a wave of superb reviews and high praise for its writer/director Ari Aster (in his feature film debut) alongside stars Toni Collette, who leads an ensemble cast that includes Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro and Ann Dowd.
Collette stars as Annie Graham, whose mother Ellen has just passed away. Following Ellen’s death, Annie and her family begin to unravel cryptic and terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited.
The Grahams are a seemingly ordinary, relatable American family, plunged into grief in Hereditary’ s gripping opening minutes. Grappling with the loss of Ellen Leigh – Annie’s mother and cryptic matriarchal figure for the family, whose legacy becomes increasingly sinister as the story unfolds – the Grahams process the death in disparate ways.
When Annie attends a bereavement support group, we learn more about her late mother’s life and heritage and Annie’s feelings of alienation in her own family.
Aster’s first full-length feature comes on the heels of a series of critically acclaimed short films he made, focusing on domestic rituals and trauma, telling the chilling story of one American family battling malevolent forces that seek to colonise its bloodline.
The writer/director envisioned the story for the film after his own family endured a string of trials over a number of years. “Things had gotten so relentlessly awful that the feeling prevailed that we basically must be cursed,” he says. “I’m always writing from a personal place, but I also love genre, and I’d never want to dramatise any of the suffering that I or my family had gone through. So, by taking the idea of a family being cursed, then literalising that, I was able to put a lot of those feelings through a horror movie filter, where the canvas demands a high level of catharsis. And, if you’re making a film about life being unfair, the horror genre is a very unique playground for that. It’s this sort of perverse space where life’s injustices are more or less celebrated and even gloried in.”
My hope is that it stays with people for a long time and provokes them to contend with something deeper
Aster cites influences from family dramas – including 1980’s Ordinary People, 1997’s The Ice Storm, and 2001’s In the Bedroom, in which multigenerational families grapple with death, mental illness and emotional violence.
Aster flips the script on the domestic tragedy by pushing his creation Hereditary, into the realm of supernatural horror. He fuses the substance of these emotional dramas with creative inspiration from iconic slow-burn shockers of the 1960s and 1970s, including Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Don’t Look Now (1973), and The Innocents (1961).
“These were character-driven, sophisticated movies that really took their time,” remarks Aster. As he began writing, Aster shaped the story of a family that is literally cursed, suffering through a series of gruesome events which are revealed over time to be part of a grander Machiavellian scheme.
In its rigorous examination of free will and its damning insistence that everything is ordained and inevitable, Hereditary takes a fatalistic stance toward breeding and generation.
“The fact that the Grahams have no agency is a crucial point in this movie, and the feeling at the end is one of hopelessness and futility,” says Aster. “I wanted to make a simultaneously intimate and large-scale horror film that absolutely refuses to let the viewer off the hook. My hope is that it stays with people for a long time and provokes them to contend with something that is deeper and more primal, a feeling of something inescapable.”
This seems to have paid off, with the Chicago Sun-Times saying: “The shock moments here (including one that might send one or two viewers running for the exit) are truly stunning, grotesque, and bizarre – they will stay with you long after you’ve gone home for the night.”
While Collette is also earning much kudos, with Empire magazine stating that “Aster really puts her through the wringer, inflicting on his star-sufferer woes comparable with those suffered by both Essie Davis, in 2014’s The Babadook and Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist. Combined. Her screen-filling, straight-to-camera looks of sheer, unfiltered terror are likely to stay with you for as long as many of Hereditary’s other scares”.