●●○○○, entirely for the acting.
It is, ultimately, the off-screen actions and allegiances of this dead character that set up the bizarrely baroque final act of the film.
Hereditary is a film that is ostensibly about family and legacy — it’s right there in the title. Annie (Toni Collette) is a recently-bereaved daughter, a sister whose brother died young, a wife, and a mother. She’s positioned in the centre of the strange family the film centres on but struggles to bond with any of them. Her eulogy for her late mother is stark and critical and her emotional unburdening is at a grief support group, surrounded by strangers. The family home is outside of town, surrounded by forest and mountains, and replicated in miniature: Annie is also a dollhouse artist who seems to be working out traumas by making them smaller and externalised. It’s an insular world Hereditary builds up, but the horrors all seem to be coming from without.
One of the great mistakes of Hereditary is making it relatively clear from early on that there is something external that is haunting this family. The dead grandmother whose funeral opens the film is described by Annie in her therapy group as not only a deeply private, troubled individual, but often estranged. It’s not only a glaring moment of ‘telling, not showing’ (some of the creepiest details of this story are related in spoken exposition rather than played out on screen), but it positions the grandmother outside of the main familial unit. And it is, ultimately, the off-screen actions and allegiances of this dead character that set up the bizarrely baroque final act of the film.
The figure of the mother and the idea of motherhood have a long history in horror movies and even beyond, in so many fairytales. Rosemary’s Baby turns the anxieties of pregnancy into a story about Satanism and possession, similar to Hereditary. The Babadook centres on a bereaved mother struggling to negotiate the demands of her role, her child, and the horror going on around her. Hereditary, in focusing on Annie, seems to be evoking this horror movie understanding of motherhood, and on the terror of mental illness as a horrible family legacy. How many horror films can you think of that are framed around the tension of whether the protagonist’s experiences are objectively real or just a symptom of their creeping madness? Gabriel Byrne, playing Annie’s husband, seems to be existing in a version of this story in which his wife is genuinely unhinged with grief and guilt, and he remains the film’s grounding presence right up until the moment — well, you’ll see.
For me, the emotional climax of the movie comes before the final act, and ends up being a moment that was only a dream. Annie confronts her son, Peter (played by the incredible Alex Wolff), about his actions around a linchpin moment, but also blurts out that she never wanted him in the first place. She’d tried to miscarry multiple times and didn’t want to be his mother. Peter’s horrified relief that this heartbreaking suspicion he’s established as having (again via spoken exposition rather than anything in the film) might actually be true, contrasting with the guilty catharsis that Collette imbues Annie with, is probably the single most effecting thing in the film for me. It would be a shockingly brilliant moment — if the film had continued to be about issues of family and motherhood through to the final act.
Director Ari Aster delights in his tropes, playing a huge number of them completely straight (‘teenager misbehaves at a party in a manner consistent with his age and established character only to be punished disproportionally by the narrative’ being a big one) and then having his gotcha moments when he turns one or two literally on their heads (pun intended). The trouble with this combination is that there are moments — the entire last act — that feel completely out of nowhere. It isn’t a clever inversion of audience expectations to abandon the strong point-of-view of your main character and tack on an ending that seems to be from an entirely different movie, just for shock value. (The film is barely out and there’s already multiple articles on the internet attempting to explain what on earth happened in that last scene.)
I was invested in the story being told about Annie and her creepy children. Toni Collette’s performance is utterly phenomenal and deserves all the awards. Gabriel Byrne plays off her exceptionally well, and both the children are disturbed, eerie figures. They deserved a proper conclusion to their story and really didn’t get one.
Hereditary opens in cinemas across Ireland on June 14.
