Ellen was a woman of many secrets, “private rituals” as daughter Annie (Toni Collette) puts it in her hesitant eulogy. The secrets were greater in number than Annie imagined, and “rituals” is more apposite than she might have known.
Much of Hereditary unfolds in the spooky house Annie and her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) share with their children, teenage Peter (Alex Wolff) and pre-pubescent Charlie (Milly Shapiro). It’s a rambling Craftsman house, crowned by a pair of Amityville Horror windows, whose dark wood and leaded glass suffocates the sunlight. The house is set in a Brothers Grimm birch forest linked to town by a highway unlit at night. First-time director Ari Aster favors a palette of black with shades of dim, broken by lurid flashes of blood red.
Family drama and the supernatural blur into one another until the distinctions are unrecognizable. Annie is an artist whose dollhouse-like miniatures replicate her surroundings and anxieties. Charlie is a troubled child who sleeps in the unheated attic the night before the funeral as if in fear of what dwells below; during grandmother’s funeral she fills her notepad with grotesque faces; finding a dead bird, she snips off the head and pockets it. Peter is sulky and sullen, unremarkable for his age, but his brooding will assume stranger and stranger forms. Steve is the portrait of ineffectual fatherhood. Charlie is near-catatonic but his only response is to caution her against eating nuts. As a husband, his unstated resentments gradually curdle into hatred.
Annie is the force within the family and Collette gives a terrific performance. Grief slips easily into rage, guilt into violent outbursts. Details emerge: suicides in the family, Ellen and Annie lived apart and out of touch for years, Annie’s sleepwalking—a danger not only to herself but to her children. And yes, Ellen, and those occult books and a strange recurring symbol suggesting the weave of an alternate reality.
Anxiety mounts slowly in Hereditary before it begins to snowball. At firsts it’s an anomaly here and there—a shape in the dark that probably isn’t there, weird blue lights that might be a trick of the eye, a triangle drawn on the floorboards that no one had noticed before, a door open when it should have been locked, a reflection in glass that’s not a reflection.
With lurking cameras following the characters with a slow yet soft trudge, a pace as unhurried as a nightmare that refuses to end and ominous music followed by eerier silence, Hereditary claims many chilling moments. The director realizes that what’s left unseen or glimpsed in shadows is scarier than any computer-generated monster. And in Hereditary, the monsters, living or dead, are human.
