Hereditary

[Call_me_jorge]

I’m so looking forward to this movie. Especially getting to see one of the original broadway Matilda’s, Milly, on screen.

[spiderdj82]

Me too.  So far it has a 100% on rottentomatoes.  I'm ready for a legit scary movie. 

 

[ColorTheHours048]

I’ve been compulsively reading every review or article that has come out about this for the last 4 months. To say I’ve been anticipating it would be an understatement.

A24 is absolutely nailing their roster of film releases, particularly their embrace of genre films that would otherwise never make it in the mainstream.

[Sally Durant Plummer]

I will see Toni Collette in anything - I saw Krampus for christ’s sake - and this film looks like the perfect psychological horror I’ve been craving ever since the brilliant mother!. Count me as very, very excited.

[TheGingerBreadMan]

Add me to those who are very, very excited.

[SweetLips]

Got 5 Stars in an Aussie newspaper and that's VERY rare for that reviewer.

[ColorTheHours048]

I saw it last night. I can see this already dividing audiences into the camps that take their hype with a grain of salt and enjoy the experience for what it is, and those who believe everything they see is going to blow everything they saw before out of the water and claim its “dumb” if it didn’t. I am firmly in the former camp, happy to say.

The slow burn of this movie is comparable to The Witch and shares a lot of the same qualities in terms of dynamics among the characters - it being a horror movie trading in the disintegration of the family unit in the wake of unspeakable tragedy and all. Comparatively, Hereditary is a much more nightmarish, surreal experience that delivers on a more guttural level than The Witch’s brain-f**kery. (For the record, I think The Witch is a modern masterpiece and an excellent sign of the shift in horror genre sensibilities.)

Toni Colette is outstanding, as so many have noted already. But really, the acting work across the board is gorgeously layered and complex, which speaks as much to the casting department as it does the brilliant Ari Aster. What a career this guy could have after this. The script and the way it comes together onscreen never go anywhere you expect it to, even when the plot reveals seem telegraphed from a mile away. He’s constantly swerving into and around audience expectations in a way that keeps you constantly off-guard.

I’m excited for more people to see this. It’s exceptionally well-made and goes darker than most movies would ever dare in a mainstream market. But that’s part of its brilliance. If I had one problem, it’s that it does air on the draggy side for the first 45 minutes or so. Once the credits rolled, I appreciated the deliberateness, but was struggling a little early on to see how it would pay off. It does.

[adamgreer]

I guess I’m in the latter camp, as I left unimpressed. The ending, which I won’t spoil, is very much going to divide people, I think. Collette, of course, is wonderful. Gabriel Byrne got stuck in a very poorly written archetype role, but he tries to make it work. Alex Woolf, once a member of The Naked Brothers Band, was the real pleasant surprise here. Great work from him.

The biggest surprise for me was seeing The Handmaids Tale’s “Aunt Lydia” appear about a third of the way into the movie. So much so that I rather loudly whispered “It’s Aunt Lydia!” by accident. She’s wonderful, but you can see where they’re going with her character the minute she appears on screen.

My biggest problem with the film is that it’s rather predictable but slow in the beginning, and then that ending is just...off. Most of the reviews I read discuss the ending and all mention how divisive they think it’s going to be.

[ColorTheHours048]

I’m curious what you found “off” about the ending? For me, it strung everything together perfectly and finally satisfied the tension they had been mounting and never relieving.

[Sally Durant Plummer]

Well, well, well. We surely are in a golden age of horror films. And not just the slasher-of-the-week fare that we have grown accustomed to, but films that create worlds, and characters, that are more than fresh meat or a parade of victims. Hereditary begins as a rich meditation on mourning inter-spliced with the hallmarks of good poltergeist films: dead people appearing, characters acting strangely, nightmarish sequences that are indistinguishable from reality. But in this soulful film, these tropes appear in a more minor key. They are not here to elicit shock and gasps, but rather to create a mood of oppressive terror. Terror that begins to slowly simmer until by the final sequences, we have landed in what seems like a different film from the beginning. To the credit of Ari Aster that the film feels perfectly paced and the transition is haldly noticable when beeing watched. The final half-hour may not be the most horrifying sequence I've ever seen in a film (that title is still easily held by last year's mother!), but the depths it reaches is astounding, and the last minute is jaw-dropping - when was the last time a tableu has delievered such indescribable feelings?

The cast is more than game and Toni Collette is astounding in her role. All of the major players are doing some astonishing work and make each character feel like flesh and blood humans, a welcome change fron the usual wooden prop-like characters of the horror genre. I wonder how this will fare commerically next weekend - like mother!, it's more art film than horror in the traditional, matinee sense and I can't help but wonder if it's too good to succeed. Regardless, Hereditary is a stunner that will stay in your thoughts long after the lights rise.

[broadway86]

FB review that I wrote after catching the Thursday night screening:

Comparisons to “The Exorcist”, "The Shining", and “Rosemary’s Baby” are not unfounded. “Hereditary”, the debut feature of writer/director Ari Aster, is one that takes familiar trends from genre classics and uses them as building blocks to tell a story that is unique and terrifying in its own right.

Toni Collette gives a masterful performance as Annie, an artist whose mother has just passed away when the story begins. She meets every complex layer that this roles asks of her, and then some. The acting across the board is astonishing, with two other standouts. Alex Wolff is vivid and sympathetic as Annie’s son, Peter, and the great Ann Dowd makes a huge impression with limited screentime as Joan, a fellow member of Annie’s grief support group.

As stated before, Aster utilizes elements that we have seen in previous films - a seance, ghosts, etc - and assembles a plot that is sinister and shocking at each turn. I guarantee you will not see most of this stuff coming. Thankfully, jump scares are kept to an absolute minimum, in favor of lingering moments of terror, and images that have been etched into my brain for the foreseeable future.

But more than that, the reason why I think “Hereditary” will stick the landing is that it’s rooted in genuine fears, the ones that connect all of us. For all of the supernatural chaos, there is tangible emotion, and a very relatable subtext about the destructive nature of grief, guilt, and trauma. This is a movie that is not easy to shake.

[artscallion]

ColorTheHours048 said: "The slow burn of this movie is comparable to The Witch and shares a lot of the same qualities in terms of dynamics among the characters - it being a horror movie trading in the disintegration of the family unit in the wake of unspeakable tragedy and all. Comparatively, Hereditary is a much more nightmarish, surreal experience that delivers on amore guttural level than The Witch’s brain-f**kery. (For the record, I think The Witch is a modern masterpiece and an excellent sign of the shift in horror genre sensibilities.)"

 

I couldn't make it past the first twenty minutes of The Witch. Between the sound mixing, the accents, the olde English and the father's gravelly voice, I couldn't make out a word anyone was saying. At. All.

 

[ColorTheHours048]

artscallion said: "ColorTheHours048 said: "The slow burn of this movie is comparable to The Witch and shares a lot of the same qualities in terms of dynamics among the characters - it being a horror movie trading in the disintegration of the family unit in the wake of unspeakable tragedy and all. Comparatively, Hereditary is a much more nightmarish, surreal experience that delivers on amore guttural level than The Witch’s brain-f**kery. (For the record, I think The Witch is a modern masterpiece and an excellent sign of the shift in horror genre sensibilities.)"



I couldn't make it past the first twenty minutes of The Witch. Between the sound mixing, the accents, the olde English and the father's gravelly voice, I couldn't make out a word anyone was saying. At. All.

"

I’ve always been perplexed by this criticism, which I’ve seen often. Obviously there’s validity to it if so many people feel that way, but I personally had little to no issue understanding both the language and the accents. (The only time I truly couldn’t make out what the father was saying was the scene where he was eating dirt and crying to God.)

[spiderdj82]

My issue with "The Witch" was the trailers (and marketing in general) made it seem like it was a slam-blang horror movie with plenty of scares.  So, when I went in, I was expecting to be terrified.   Well......it wasn't.   When I left I said to my friend, "That was one of the most boring movies I've ever seen."   Now, that it's been a while since I've seen it, I can appreciate it more.  Although, I still have issues with way the story went.   

But, back to the topic of this thread, I plan to see "Hereditary" this weekend. 

[henrikegerman]

Frankly disappointed in this movie, and the comparisons to Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Shining, Don't Look Now and The Witch didn't help.  In style, at times it's more like Get Out, but Get Out without much humor and with far less if any real point to it. 

It's still worth seeing for some madly disturbing and scary moments and for the acting.

The final scenes left me with many questions.  Worse, I'm not even convinced any of them are worth asking.   

[QueenAlice]

One of the only movies I have ever walked out of. I thought it was an incoherent slog and Toni Collette’s performance high camp. This years’ MOTHER but at least in that film the director seemed to be in on the joke.