Hereditary

First of all, it was no fun to watch, and secondly, it wasn’t scary. These criticisms seem fairly damning, I realize, but perhaps Hereditary is a film that works better in retrospect. Divorced from context, its disturbing images are the stuff of nightmares. (The trailer is much scarier than the movie, and I think that’s why.) I’m pretty sure some of those graphic sights are going to come back to haunt me as I try to fall asleep tonight. And Toni Collette’s riveting lead performance will be back, too, haunting Academy members this winter as they consider which five women to nominate for Best Actress. (She may not make the final ballot, but she’s definitely going to come up a lot in the discussion.)

Maybe I’m being a little hard on the movie because my daughter and I are doing a classic movie project this summer and starting with Hitchcock. In the past few days, we’ve watched The Lodger, Notorious, Psycho, Strangers on a Train, and The Birds. So I mean how can you top those? (Maybe with Rear Window, North by Northwest, and Frenzy. We’ll find out soon.) The point is, that’s a tough act to follow.

If anything, Hereditary made me feel better about my relationship with my son. Just yesterday, I was devastated all afternoon following an ugly confrontation in the car on the way back from the grocery store. What started as a fun outing to buy a sunflower turned horrific when I wouldn’t let my two-year-old steal his sister’s candy (allegedly better than his own). One minute, I was calm and patient and full of sweet, motherly platitudes. The next, sunflower heads and petals were flying all over the backseat as he savagely plucked them in a fit of rage, and from behind the wheel, I screamed helplessly with equal venom and spiraling hysteria, “Stop it! Stop it! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!!!!!!!!!!!” Large portions of the sunflower made it home intact, but, exhausted and defeated, I was less sure about our relationship.

When it comes to maternal savagery, though, I can’t hold a candle to Toni Collette (or a match and a bottle of kerosene, for that matter). As I watched Hereditary, I couldn’t help smiling to myself and re-imagining the film as an ABC After School Special titled Why Peter Is in Foster Care Now.

The Good:
This movie kept making me laugh to myself. I couldn’t help imagining it being shown in an MST3K type format. I don’t mean that as a slight. Austin’s Master Pancake Theater regularly mocks good movies. (When I watched them do the original Planet of the Apes once, I thought, “This seems made to be mocked!” Charlton Heston is so mockable, yet at the same time, he’s giving an excellent, iconic performance.)

Toni Collette is giving an even better performance as Annie. Honestly, an Oscar win for her does not seem beyond the realm of possibility. She really is great in the part. You know how directors sometimes say things to actors like, “Be big! I’ll tell you when it’s too much”? It’s like that’s happening here, except Ari Aster never says when. The actress gets bigger and bigger and bigger until she’s giving a performance the size of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float, and the director just lets her fly free. Collette, fortunately, is a very gifted actress, so her big, intense performance works. (In the same situation, I would ultimately fly away, to be replaced by my understudy.)

Annie’s backstory is what amuses me so much…because it’s so sad and horrible. It’s not that I have a sick sense of humor so much as a mentally ill sense of humor. These awful things become funny when they keep happening to you. It’s a defense mechanism. I mean, the dark secrets of her family keep slipping out slowly, one at a time. She teases them out, and the longer she draws out the tease, the more and more awful it is. And as she talks about her family, we realize, finally, that she’s actually talking about herself (because that’s the way it is, you know, when it’s hereditary). At the funeral, she says a little bit. And in her art, she says a little bit more. And at the support group, she says more…and more…and more. And finally, when she’s talking to Joan, we get to the crux of the matter. And we think, “Aha, yes, there it is,” because if everybody in your family is crazy…

As a kid, I used to find zany stories about my crazy relatives so amusing. Then when I turned out to have bipolar disorder, I thought, “How did I not see this coming?” Really, when I was a child I never realized that I was just growing into all the mental illness I had noted in my relatives.

I really love the way Annie tries to minimalize, shrug off, excuse her own abnormal behavior. (“My mother was insane and abusive, but all those times I tried to murder my kids don’t count because I wasn’t myself.” Mmhm. You keep telling yourself that, sister.) It’s almost amusing the way she increasingly insists that people mistakenly believe that she’s mentally ill or unreliable as she acts increasingly mentally ill and unreliable. With that level of protesting too much and slipping into madness, she’d feel right at home in Hamlet.

What’s really funny is that Collette so nails the character that even though the movie shows me abundant visual evidence that Annie is not being crazy this time, I still don’t believe what she is saying. This “you’ve got to believe me” character shows up all the time in movies, the protagonist with a history of mental illness, substance abuse, crazy schemes, failing to follow police procedure and jumping to the wrong conclusions. Usually, we see this person screw up in the beginning, and that’s why nobody believes them this time. But we’re the audience, and we’ve been closely following their adventures, so we know that this time, they really are right. Usually, we’re conditioned to believe this character, so we almost always do. But I don’t believe Annie. I believe she’s being honest, but I also believe she’s psychotic. I’ve been psychotic myself. I know what it looks like.

So by the time we reach the point when everything is on the line, and we must believe Annie, I find myself saying instead, “Nope! Gabriel Byrne’s thing, I think that!” Seriously, at that stage, if we don’t believe Annie, the ending of the movie makes no sense. But the endings of horror movies often make no sense. I’ve been psychotic, and Toni Collette is thoroughly convincing as a woman struggling with mental illness, overwhelmed by crisis. The performance is too good.  I have to believe Toni Collette and not Annie.

Even though elements of the movie amused me (in a sad sort of shaking-my-head way) please don’t mistake this for one of those fun horror movies that makes the audience giggle and jump. It’s the exact opposite. (I think that’s why my mind introduced a humorous running commentary, to protect me from the creepy, depressing mood.)

Some of the stuff that happens in this movie is awful. In fact, everything that happens is awful. But the most unexpected awful thing surprised me in a bad way and gutted my husband. As horror, I’m not sure that Hereditary always works. But as heavy drama, it’s firing on all cylinders all the time.

Collette would not be undeserving of an Oscar, and the rest of the cast is also quite strong. Young Milly Shapiro brings an unsettling eeriness (but, somehow, also an earnest sweetness) to Charlie. Alex Wolff gets to show way more range here than he did when I last saw him in Jumanji. Both young actors are required to do difficult things and portray tricky characters, and they both nail it. I’m particularly intrigued by Wolff, who has the bigger part and will probably get cast in all kinds of amazing roles following a performance like this.

Gabriel Byrne is also excellent playing the only person of sound mind in the family (because he married in). Byrne’s understated turn as Steve gets somewhat overshadowed by the intensity and theatrics of the others, but without him, the entire thing would (I am sure) fall apart. I loved Byrne almost as much as Collette because it’s hard to make an impression by playing the quiet, stable person surrounded by mentally ill people being hunted by evil.

I also loved Ann Dowd as Joan who seems delighted to have wandered into this film by mistake on her way to Rosemary’s Baby.

Best Scene:
As I sat and watched Annie holding that evil journal in her hand as she raved desperately at her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) in front of the fireplace, I thought, “Well, this is it. This is the real (hor?)crux of the movie. It’s the moment of truth. What happens next will answer so many questions.” I honestly wasn’t sure which way it was going to go. Then it went a way that I never expected. Toni Collette is fabulous in this scene, start to finish.

As someone who frequently raves in terror, I kept watching her performance and mentally compiling a list, Lines Not To Cross If You Want Your Husband To Continue Engaging With Your Nonsense.

Collette is absolutely fantastic in this scene, start to finish.

Best Scene Visually:
So apparently this house comes with a cool light switch that flips the sky on and off. The way night flips to day is one of the coolest things about the movie. I guess that happens when you’re cursed by evil. But if it happens to you, don’t assume the worst and panic. That can also happen during a manic episode. So if you experience it, you probably don’t need an exorcist, just a psychiatrist and a lifetime of medication.  (Yea!)

This entire film is exquisitely shot, though calling it beautiful seems disingenuous since so many pointedly ugly and dreadful things happen. (Maybe I shouldn’t use the word “dreadful” since that practically connotes the fun of something like Lemony Snicket these days. The dismal content here does sometimes actually make us want to look away. I did look away in one scene because I have a hang up about damaging teeth, and I was worried someone’s would be broken. I was so relieved when they were not. Dental work is so expensive. I mean, broken bones heal, and demons can be exorcised, but you only get one set of permanent teeth.)

The one moment that really resonated with me visually happened early in the film when we see one of the miniature, doll-house-like scenes that Annie has created for her upcoming gallery show. In the tiny room, we see a tiny Annie in bed nursing her tiny newborn daughter while the figure of her mother creeps closer exposing and offering her own aged breast. Annie’s artwork reveals more about her relationship with her mother than she has ever verbalized so far. It also really resonated with me personally. I definitely felt (fairly or not) that my own mother would have preferred to be the mother of my daughter when she was a baby.  Now, my mom never bared her breasts and tried to jump us, but I’ve never done half the stuff Toni Collette does in this movie, either. (A third, maybe.)

Best Action Sequence:

I hated the scene of Peter driving home from the party and loved the scene of Peter waking up and wandering to the fireplace while looking for his parents.  (Toni Collette’s part here is…one of the things I haven’t done.)

The Negatives:
As the end credits ran, the people next to us started talking about the movie.

“That movie took a month to film?” one repeated incredulously. “Feels like it took a month to watch!”

I laughed before I could stop myself.

Truly at many moments during the movie, I found myself thinking, Am I enjoying this?

I never answered that question. Guilt kept me silent because I’m the one who convinced my husband to see Hereditary when all the good seats to Oceans 8 were gone. His #2 pick was Hotel Artemis.

I felt like I kept waiting and waiting and waiting. And for what?

“You know, I’m not sorry I saw this movie,” said someone in that group next to us. “Especially since you paid.”

His friend anticipated, “But you wouldn’t necessarily buy it for your collection?”

And the first guy gasped in horror, “God, no!”

I think I liked these strangers better than I liked the movie. Hereditary is just not very fun to watch. The most dynamic and thrilling parts come at the very end, but, problematically, the more exciting the movie gets, the less sense it makes.

As I watched, I kept thinking things like, “This is like Poltergeist without the fun and Rosemary’s Baby without the coherence.” Of course, should a movie about evil really be fun to experience? Hereditary does score points from me for pointing out that spiritualism is not a great idea for the casual hobbyist and an even worse pastime for the mentally ill. (Don’t play with Ouija Boards. Just don’t.)  But still, the film could at least let us have a little fun. Maybe Joan is having fun. She keeps showing up, all gung-ho, her energy seeming to urge, “Come on, guys, let’s play Rosemary’s Baby!” But meanwhile, the Graham family are too busy setting each other on fire to worry over the details of the plot. So many plots keep getting dug up in this movie, and in the end, I wanted to ask the writer/director, “Where did you dig up this one?”

I don’t know. My daughter and I just watched an old Dick Cavett interview with Alfred Hitchcock, and he emphasized that a sense of fun is crucial when making movies so grounded in dread and suspense. Psycho is genuinely creepy, but it’s also fun. The Birds is brutal and unnerving, but it’s fun, too. Of course, Tippi Hedren didn’t have much fun. Maybe Hereditary is what it looks like when the victim is in charge of the narrative instead of the sadist.

On a metaphorical level, Hereditary definitely works. I just have trouble believing the supernatural element. I find the ending more coherent if we just assume that those experiencing it are psychotic, and no one who is not psychotic is present to intervene.

In a way, this is unfair because I myself write novels with supernatural elements, and I expect readers to believe them. The thing is, I really do believe, say, Penélope Cruz in Gothika, but I can’t believe Annie here. So many of the creepy, foreshadowing details we’ve observed have also been seen, heard, or even told to us by Annie. (And what else has Annie done that we haven’t seen?)

Once years ago when I was psychotic during full blown mania, I was terrified of an admitting nurse because she wore a necklace with a peculiar charm around her neck. To me, it seemed sinister, and I began to worry that she was involved in an occult conspiracy to silence and harm me.  I asked, “What is that on the necklace you’re wearing?” She replied, “Oh, it’s a religious symbol.” (Of course, my vision kept blurring because I had been awake for five days, so I couldn’t see the charm clearly.  It was probably a cross!)  The point is, her answer clinched it for me. She was one of the people trying to hurt me. The thing is, all of the details in these stories always add up because the mentally ill person is the one selecting the details and inventing the story.  All the details add up because the story is made entirely of those details.  But when you are that person, the story seems as inescapable and terrifying as it does to Toni Collette. 

Something horrific is happening to Annie and her biological son? Of course it is under the circumstances. No evil cult is needed to explain that.

Actually, I’m torn. I think a second viewing of the film would clear up a lot of things for me, but I don’t really want to watch the film a second time. I didn’t enjoy it much the first time.

Overall:
In Hereditary, Toni Collette gives a performance so good that she could get an Academy Award nomination and would deserve to win. The rest of the cast is also excellent. I didn’t enjoy watching the movie, though. Though I’m easily terrified, I didn’t find it scary at all, just sad.