Butler's Cinema Scene

Toni Collette

“HEREDITARY” My rating: B 

127 minutes | MPAA rating: R

No one expects world-class acting from a horror movie. So when you get precisely that, it comes on like a sucker punch.

“Hereditary” is a ghost story — I think — featuring Toni Collette in an emotional performance that will leave audiences limp and exhausted.

Writer/director  Ari Aster’s film is hard to pin down…it may be about ghosts, or it may be a psychological study of mental and spiritual anguish manifesting in very creepy ways.

As the film begins Annie Graham (Collette) is burying her mother, from whom she was estranged for years before finally taking in the old lady at death’s door. Annie isn’t sure whether to react with sobs or cartwheels…Mom was a notoriously difficult personality.  (In her eulogy, Annie says she’s gratified to see so many new faces…she didn’t know this many people cared about her mother. It’s the film’s first subtle clue that Mom had a secret life.)

In the wake of the funeral Annie and her family try to get back to normal.  Husband Steve  (Gabriel Byrne) is an understanding intellectual type. Son Peter (Alex Wolff) is a teen pothead. Daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is something else again, an elfin misfit who, unlike other members of the family, really loved her grandma. In fact, she starts seeing apparitions of the dear departed.

One cannot say much about the plot of “Heredity” without ruining some major surprises.  Let’s just say that Grandma’s death is only the first tragedy to befall the clan; a far more traumatic one is yet to come.

And in the wake of that an emotionally shattered Annie finds herself turning first to a grief support group and then to a fellow mourner (the great Ann Dowd) who claims to have found a way to communicate with the dead.

Aster plays his cards very carefully,  dealing big plot points so matter of factly that it’s only in retrospect that we understand their importance.  There’s no big reveal until the end (and even then it’s a bit ambiguous); mostly he builds a nerve-wracking tension from small moments and observations. (Although there is a dramatic seance scene guaranteed to make every hair on your body stand up and salute.)

Millie Shapiro

If Aster’s overall concept isn’t exactly original (“Rosemary’s Baby” is a hugely influential antecedent), his execution is unlike anything we’ve seen.

Collette’s depiction of a mother in mourning is so vivid and real that it doesn’t need the ghost story trappings. It stands on its own as a devastating piece of acting.

Same goes for Wolff’s Peter, who over the course of the film emerges as the focal character. The kid is so weighed down by guilt that he’s nearly catatonic.

Alex Wolff

And the production design is brilliant.  The Grahams live in a lovely mountainside chalet whose high ceilings and narrow halls slowly take on the atmosphere of a classic haunted house.

And there’s Annie’s career as an artist who builds painstakingly detailed dioramas of (often traumatic) moments from her own life.  One such depiction finds Annie in a hospital bed with the newborn Charlie in her arms; standing next to her is Mom, offering her own bared breast to nurse her new granddaughter.

Yikes.

| Robert W. Butler