A Death in the Family Reveals Disturbing Secrets

Toni Collette in "Hereditary"
Photo Credit: Imdb.com

After spending most of your life with your family, you think that you know everything about them.  However, there could just as much that’s being kept from you.  This raises the question, how well do you know your family?

This is something that’s asked in writer-director Ari Astor’s supernatural-horror film, “Hereditary,” a feature-filmmaking debut that presents a moviegoing experience that’s artful and terrifying.   

The story follows Annie and Steve Graham (Toni Collette and Gabriel Byrne) and their two children, Peter and Charlie (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro), as Annie discovers unsettling family secrets after the death of her mother.

Collette delivers a shattering performance that’s destined to become a highlight of her career.  The amount of power that she puts into her work here is staggering, and she throws herself into this role and refuses to hold anything back.  It’s impossible to pick out which of her scenes is the best because each one shows the work of a master, whether it be a monologue that she delivers at a grief-counseling session, the horror at certain familial revelations, or a tense dinner scene with her family.  Collette’s performance almost makes you not want to watch the movie again because of how grueling her scenes can become as she expresses how her character feels.

Throughout the film, Annie works on miniature sets that she’s preparing for an art gallery, and the cinematography by Pawel Pogorzelski frames the interior and exterior of the house in such a way to make it look like one of those sets.  While inside, he uses many shots where we see the entirety of a room within the frame, and the way that the image is staged accomplishes that look.  On the outside, there are a couple of shots where the house looks like an actual miniature set.

Besides Pogorzelski’s expert camerawork of the house, he also creates several bone-chilling shots.  There’s one point in the film where the camera lingers on a shot for about a minute, and depending on where you’re looking on the screen, it might take you a few seconds to catch what’s there.  But, once you see it, you can’t take your eyes off of it because you’re left sitting still to see what happens.  It’s a quiet scene that’s not ruined by any jump-scare music stings, but instead relies on the atmosphere and framing of the image to scare you.

Thanks to the production design by Grace Yun and art direction by Richard T. Olson, the film’s concept of isolation is reflected in the layout of the house.  The house has considerable space to it, and because it’s only being occupied by four people, there’s a lot of emptiness within that space, resulting in the vastness of the isolated indoor space reflecting the vastness of the isolated outdoor space.

The screenplay by Astor takes a set-up that we’ve seen before, but constructs his own story around it.  He explores the negative things that we may inherit from our family, how families handle tragedies, and the impacts that previous generations within a family can have on the newer ones, all of which create a heartbreaking, fascinating, and devastating examination of a family who’s experiencing unspeakable horrors, both real-life and supernatural, and intertwines them to hard-hitting effect.  As with other horror films from A24, this is a movie that presents several ideas and explores them in a such a way that prompts deep discussions after the movie’s over.

Going back to the theme of isolation in regard to the screenplay, it seems to be a common concept throughout many of A24’s horror films, where they use a small cast of characters and explore the impact that they have on each other, all while being confined to one location for most of the movie.  We’ve seen this in “It Comes at Night,” “The Blackcoat’s Daughter,” “The Monster,” “The Witch,” and even their sci-fi thriller “Ex Machina,” which itself has a some horror elements.

As a director, Astor does all that he can to get the fullest feeling of dread throughout the movie.  Although the film is frightening as a whole, the last 10 minutes rendered me immobile and numb, and it might have even taken me a few seconds to regain the feeling in my legs when I stood up from my seat after the movie was over; I’m not sure if a horror movie has ever had that effect on me.  Astor uses every technical aspect of the movie to create one of the most-memorable horror experiences in recent years, and when it’s mixed with the rawness of the acting that he extracts from Collette, it makes for two hours of complete terror that you can’t miss. 

A24 continues their impressive track record when it comes to horror movies because they know how to scare and challenge you at the same, and Astor’s achievement isn’t any different.  I guess you can say that, between this and A24’s other accomplished films in the horror genre, that trait is hereditary.  

Final grade: A-