Five-Legged Iguana

10 Slots for the Best Horror I've Seen in the Past Year
[6 of 10]

HEREDITARY

(January 2018)

"My mother was a very secretive and private woman. She had private rituals, private friends, private anxieties.”

Annie (the always amazing Toni Collette) reads the above as part of the eulogy for her mother, Ellen.

The fact that

A) this takes place less than 5 minutes into Hereditary’s running time, and

B) the film actually opens with Ellen’s obituary

should be a clear sign that one of the movie’s main themes is the desolation of familial loss.

It’s a difficult film to get through, particularly if you’ve slogged through that brutally vicious type of grief yourself.

But of course, what writer/director Ari Aster does in his feature debut is to use that emotional wrack and ruin to delve into the secrets that gradually accrete onto any family tree, all the unspoken and repressed feelings that only manage to fester and insidiously poison if kept in the darkness of silence.

And all that is made even worse if some of those secrets are, let’s just say, not your run-of-the-mill garden variety domestic dramas…

So long as you’re prepared for the tragic and emotionally gut-wrenching aspect of Hereditary, you’ll find this to be an astoundingly solid feature debut by Aster, with a killer cast; Collette is joined by Gabriel Byrne (both of whom double up and executive produce as well) and Ann Dowd.

Plus, Alex Wolff and newcomer Milly Shapiro (who play Annie’s children) acquit themselves commendably in the shadow of that intimidating acting trio…

And how messed up is it that even after that mondo bizarro third act (which manages to capture the unsettling nightmare idea of waking up to find the sanctity of home transmogrified into a perverse charnel house, all that rot finally blooming into a pervasive malignance), I still ended up snuffling when “Both Sides Now” (the original Judy Collins recording) plays over the end titles?

Man, this movie…

“But now old friends are acting strange, they shake their heads,
They say I've changed,
But something's lost, but something's gained, in living every day…”

--“Both Sides Now”

(Written by Joni Mitchell)

Parting Shot:

So looking forward to Aster’s follow-up, Midsommar…

(Hereditary OS’ courtesy of impawards.com.)