Family as the source of dread and horror
Families gather at a funeral home to say goodbye. Warm, soft waves of organ music bathe the viewing of an open casket that rests near a portrait of a smiling elderly woman. The reviewing line snakes away from the casket. Reverence, sorrow, and the beginnings of grief swirl around the gathered. A granddaughter named Charlie (Milly Shapiro) approaches the casket. Doubt and curiosity play on her face. She touches her grandmother’s body ever so slightly. No jumping, twitching, or ghostly images… nothing. As she begins to move away, however, she notices someone’s fingertips lightly spreading something on the lips of the deceased. She wonders if this is normal. She looks up, and catches the face of a man sitting behind the casket. A man with a strangely out of place smile on his lips. Her gaze lingers a beat too long on the man, then she moves off toward the rest of the ceremony.
What are we to make of this exchange? During the eulogy, the deceased’s daughter begins ordinarily enough, but veers back and forth between praise for her mother, and language that can barely hold back an explosively accusatory energy. She tries to both laud and chide. Sitting disbelieving in their pews with Charlie are her rumpled father and slightly dazed older brother. Later, they return to their grand home and try to settle back into their respective routines. Cautiously at first, they ask each each how they should be feeling. Sad? Mad? Relieved? No relief or explanation, just questions hanging in the air. The daughter goes upstairs to her attic studio and back to her work as an artist of dioramas of everyday life. She works in a big room with dim corners. After a while she looks up… and it appears she sees an image of her recently deceased mother, in a far off dark corner of the room, that same smile on her lips, leering at her. She turns on the light and the image is gone.
Such is the opening of first time feature director Ari Aster’s new film Hereditary. Most of the action occurs in the Graham family’s home, that place that should provide safe harbor from life’s storms, but here becomes something very different. The mother is Annie Leigh (Toni Collette), with large, questioning eyes and a confident gait. The father, stooped and exhausted, is Steve (Gabriel Bryne). The older brother, with an unruly shock of hair and a faraway look, is Peter (Alex Wolff). The family seems barely able to function as a unit. Each dinner conversation is just one terse exchange away from an argument. Each night the four pursue separate interests after dinner.
With precision pacing, Aster and editors Lucian Johnston and Jennifer Lame start with a not-so-harmonious family unit, and slowly and deliberately create an atmosphere of dread and doubt. It seems that these people are just one accident away from disintegration.
When an unexpected tragedy befalls the family, we expect the pacing to quicken, the plot to accelerate. Instead, we’re forced to witness the horrors that befall us when expected grief is jolted by the type of grief that comes after a shock.
Now Annie’s accelerated unraveling tracks the pace at which the film’s plot also begins to tighten and quicken. Collette’s performance centers on they ways in which she can hold expressions first of questioning, then realization, then terror. In one scene at a grief counseling group therapy session, we lurch along with her as she hesitatingly tries to process, tries to weigh, strains even to believe, each of her haltingly uttered words and phrases. There she meets Joan (Ann Dowd), also apparently stricken with grief. The two strike up a friendship, but our doubt grows as Joan’s and Annie’s lives seem suddenly to intersect daily. Annie struggles for answers, Steve struggles to hold the family together, but their struggles pale in comparison to what Peter is going through. Played with near perfect teenage misery by Wolff, Peter seems so lost in his world of school cliques and squabbling parents that he has no chance to recognize the larger forces at work around and within him.
With such deliberate and subtle pacing, we can luxuriate in the impeccable atmosphere of ominous dread created by cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski. Detailed watching is one of the great joys of experiencing a good horror film. We pay close attention to frames, especially the periphery. We’re on the lookout for details on sets. We listen to dialogue for clues to the mystery. Since we know we’re watching a horror film, with very well-defined rules, the gradual replacement of suggestion with information gives us the pleasure of testing our ideas before the film’s truths are revealed. Since Hereditary moves so slowly for so long, we can take in loads of all kinds of details, some of which are never explained. Well placed cinematic suggestions are used as precisely as dialog or editing.
As Annie’s doubts about what’s going on deepen and she starts investigating the past and present, we begin to see through flashes and hints just the barest outlines of something much larger and more sinister at work. And yet, even here, very near the end of the film, Aster holds back, not giving in to the temptation to surface too much information too quickly. Meanwhile, in parallel, we see Peter less and less able to understand what is happening to him. Wolff is masterful at portraying the pain in a teenager who struggles daily with the hell of puberty and the growing dread of not understanding what he is becoming. We’ve seen this before, in films like Teen Wolf, An American Werewolf in London, and, of course, Carrie. Wolff understands that the terror for Peter is in the daily torture of thinking things are under control (typical teen), but realizing, with increasing terror, that something very bad is happening to him.
Hereditary includes broad references to horror masters Kubrick and De Palma. Aster has said that he wanted the look of a Kubrick film with the exhausting dread of the best De Palma stories. As required by the genre, eventually the film has to resolve in the required ways. This somewhat disappointed me, as does the ending of so many horror films. Once we learn what lies at the heart of the terror and the horror, what’s left? That’s one reason why so many horror films can never muster me for a second viewing. Hereditary does fall into that category, but I left the theater with enough doubt and questioning of my early guesses that I just might have to see it again.
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Hereditary opens today in select Bay Area theaters.
