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.)
Butler's Cinema Scene 