Hereditary (2018)
Dir. and written by Ari
Aster
Starring Toni Collette,
Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Gabriel Byrne
Part I: The Inheritance of Hereditary
My friend Mr. Majestyk has a problem. And it’s a problem
which does not, at first, sound very much like a problem at all. It it,
essentially, this: the genre that he loves dearly is experiencing something of
a cultural renaissance at the moment. After years of lurking in the
exploitation ghetto, and still more years churning out imaginative and
interesting films which were largely ignored and underrated by most of our
alleged cultural gatekeepers, Horror films are suddenly chic again. They’re
getting rave reviews from Variety, drawing hot new talent, starring
serious A-list actors. A fucking horror film was nominated for Best Picture at
last year’s Academy Awards! That would have been absolutely unthinkable
just five years ago.* For most of the history of the medium (and indeed, going
back to the very origins of horror fiction in the 19th century), everyone,
including fans, generally agreed that the genre was an artistic ghetto;
schlocky matinee stuff for the kids, an entertainment product to be produced in
high volume at low cost by hucksters and hustlers, not craftsmen. Virtually no
serious artist would touch the genre (and if a few did, well, those were just
the exceptions that proved the rule), and an A-list actor appearing in a horror
film was a blatant cry for help that they were deep in a career tailspin.
And then somehow, everything changed, the
world turned upside down, and in a few short years the genre went from artistic
pariah to a hip launching ground for the au courant aspiring artiste. And
suddenly, something like HEREDITARY was playing in mainstream theaters.
It’s difficult to put an exact date on when this shift
started. It had been gradually building for some time, and I’d be willing to
argue that it had its origins in the DTV boom of the early 2000’s, when --long
before Netflix was even a twinkle in Satan’s eye-- the need for constant new
content on Blockbuster Video shelves prompted a tidal wave of hustling
bottom-feeders to churn out low-budget genre content with just enough of an
apparent hook to snag a few ignorant suckers into a rental under the false
impression they were getting a real movie. Or not; whether or not anyone
actually watched this shit was seemingly irrelevant to the business model.
Blockbuster wanted content, and these films were mostly in the business
of providing content to Blockbuster, with the hypothetical viewer a distant
afterthought. Consequently, these films were almost uniformly horrible; lots of
low-budget cash-in sequels to theatrical movies (FROM DUSK TIL DAWN 2 and
3,
endless sequels to HELLRAISER and WRONG TURN and TREMORS and AMITYVILLE HORROR and so on) or zero-effort
time-wasters (EVIL EYES [2004] with Adam Baldwin or FURNACE [2007] with Michael
Pare, Tom Sizemore, and Danny Trejo) or that weird run of serial killer biopics
they were doing for awhile back then (GACY, HELTER SKELTER, ED GEIN). Occasionally something decent like John
Fawcett’s GINGER SNAPS or THE DARK would sneak in there, but if so, it was
mostly by accident, a thousand-monkeys-with-a-thousand-typewriters sort of
statistical anomaly, and certainly not an integral part of the business model.
These films would sometime debut in a regional festival or two, but the
business model was selling bulk units to video-rental chains, not selling
tickets to consumers (the same way that approximately 70 billion new horror
films so dismal that even I would never watch them appear every year on
Netflix, entirely to shore up their overall numbers and make them look like
they have an extensive catalogue when in fact they have about 20 movies you
want to see and then another 800,000 that are movies in the strictest possible
technical sense, but no human being would ever voluntarily watch.**)
But somewhere in the mid-2000s, something interesting
happened. As the conveyor belt of DTV genre crap became more efficient and
demonstrated it was consistently profitable, producers throttled back on
budgets, but made up for it in volume, and suddenly it became feasible for a
lot of neophytes to get a crack at directing their own movie. This was before
PARANORMAL ACTIVITY cleared the way for films which had no narrative or cinematic
content of any kind whatsoever, and so, with almost no budget for gore and tits
and rubber monsters, the aspiring filmmakers gradually started remembering the
lessons of the old Val Lewton days: if you don’t have the budget to show us the
goods, you’re gonna have to cinema the hell out of it instead. And thus, out of
necessity, the germ of artistic ambition was born.
This idea didn’t take hold immediately, of course. Cinema
is hard, and churning out cheap crap was easy. But one man rose to the challenge,
a man I think is probably more responsible for the state of modern horror than
any other single person: Producer (STAKE LAND), director (BENEATH),
actor (WE ARE STILL HERE) and noted cervidaeophobiac Larry Fessenden. Ol’
Fessywig didn’t have anything to do with HEREDITARY, and wasn’t involved with
most --if any!-- of the movies which are typically associated with this modern
movement, but I think he laid the groundwork for it. If you asked me to pick a
single starting point for how we ended up with HEREDITY, I would point you to
his 2001 film WENDIGO. It was not his first film (in fact, according to IMDB,
he’d been directing short films since 1978, though his first widely-distributed
feature was certainly HABIT in 1997) but it was a horror film that was
made for nothing and barely released, but clearly aspired to a level of
artistry which was unusual for its time.*** It’s patient and atmospheric,
character-driven, deliberately ambiguous; it insinuates, never insists. And
consequently, it will either entrance and unnerve you, or bore you into a
depressive fugue state, which makes it, I think, the most direct primordial
ancestor of modern films like THE VVITCH, IT FOLLOWS, and, yes, HEREDITARY.
WENDIGO was not overwhelmingly successful or influential, but Fessenden, I’d
argue, was: his production company, Glass Eye Pix, spent the ‘naughts slowly
cultivating young talent (Ti West, Kelly Reichardt, Glenn McQuaid, Jim Mickle,
Mickey Keating) who gradually evolved into a distinct cohort of ambitious and,
eventually, semi-respectable auteurs.
It didn’t happen
immediately, by any means; the “reception” section of Glass Eye Pix’s 2004 THE
OFF SEASON dryly notes that, “Since the film's release it has been regarded as
one of the worst movies ever, only garnishing 1.6 stars based on 395 votes on
Internet Movie Database and receiving numerous complaints on the site's message
board,” (to prove that claim, it offers four separate citations). But they got
better, and as they got better, they started gradually receiving some minor
critical notice, which in turn led to higher profiles, which led to slightly
higher budgets, which led to some minor financial successes, which led to more
producers getting interested in investing in small, ambitious horror films
which had artistic aspirations beyond the Herschell Gordon Lewises, Don
Dohlers, Charles Bands, and Fred Olen Rays of the previous generation of indie
horror moguls.
The process was slow, but it was steady. Ti West’s 2009
THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL may have been something of a tipping point; its deliberately restrained
slow-burn style and its enthusiastically positive reception (for a horror film
in 2009) seems to me to be the official inauguration of a new era in horror
cinema, wherein the genre started to draw not just ambitious young horror
buffs, but aspiring auteurs who, perhaps for the first time in the 100+ year
history of film, saw the genre as a legitimate starting ground for a serious
film career. 2011 and 2012 saw early films from Mike Flanagan (ABSENTIA)
Benson and Moorehead (RESOLUTION) Nicholas McCarthy (THE PACT), Ben Wheatley (KILL LIST) and Peter Strickland
(BERBIAN SOUND STUDIO), plus West’s THE INNKEEPERS, and Almodóvar’s THE SKIN I LIVE IN (as wells
as something quite different but tangentially important, for reasons we shall
see directly: the rapturously received horror meta-comedy CABIN IN THE WOODS.)
Now, it’s important to note that these reserved, atmosphere-driven horror films
were never overwhelmingly profuse; they were, and remain, a tiny minority of
the released horror films every year (2012 also saw the release of THE
COLLECTION, V/H/S and ABRAHAM LINCOLN, VAMPIRE HUNTER). But it was becoming
increasingly clear that a hitherto artistic eccentricity was solidifying into a
trend.
That trend became a
genuine phenomenon, I would argue, in 2014, with the release of Jennifer Kent's THE BABADOOK, the point at which the critics finally
noticed this isn’t just a great horror film, this is a great film,
period. In fact, I said something very similar myself in my original review
(and I happily stand by that to this day -- THE BABADOOK fuckin’ rocks).
Despite being shot by a first time feature director on such a modest budget
that it required a kickstarter to finish the sets, the movie bloomed into a
genuine phenomenon (William Friedkin compared it favorably to PSYCHO, ALIEN,
and DIABOLIQUE), a critical darling, and eventually, as all the truly great
ones eventually do, a gay icon.
This, it seemed, really opened the door for critics to start unabashedly
heaping praise on a series of small-scale, atmosphere-heavy indie horror film
from the subsequent years; IT FOLLOWS, THE CANAL and A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT in
2014, THE INVITATION, THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE, and THE VVITCH in 2015, EYES OF MY MOTHER, RAW, and I
AM THE PRETTY THING THAT LIVES IN THE HOUSE in 2016 (and THE MONSTER, although
I don’t know that anyone saw it), GET OUT and IT COMES AT NIGHT in 2017, and A
QUIET PLACE, SUSPIRIA, and --our subject tonight-- HEREDITARY for 2018. Reading
the plot descriptions, you wouldn’t get the sense that these movies have much
in common. But they share with each other common stylistic choices, most
notably a patient, sober ambiance with a strong emphasis on psychological
drama. Which is to say, they have a shared investment in things that critics like:
deliberate filmmaking, subtle acting, discreet thematic exploration.
What they do not always
have in abundance is a lot of actual horror. In fact, The Guardian actually took the somewhat infuriating step of dubbing them Post-horror films. They’re long on patient, icy
atmosphere, but real short on big genre payoffs. Which is where the problems
begin for poor ol’ Mr. Majestyk. Partially, this is because he requires his horror
films to be visceral on a level which I suspect puts him distinctly on the far
end of the bell curve, and so some of these movies were just never for him in
the first place. But the other problem is that he can’t help but notice that
when the critics like a horror movie, it often seems like the thing they like
about it most is that it’s mostly not a horror movie. These classy
modern horror joints tend to garner reviews which praise everything about them
except the actual horror part: ‘well, eventually it reaches the inevitable
climax and slides into predictable genre fare,’ they’ll say, ‘but until it gets
to the actual horror part, there’s lots of good acting and handsome
photography!’ Which certainly sounds a lot like ‘I liked the fact that it’s
mostly a solid drama about a sad person, and I forgive it for pandering to the
audience by having a few crumbs of sordid actual genre content in the back
end.’ No wonder the phrase "Post-horror" suggested itself.
Even when one of these
movies does get praise for its actual genre content --and often using reckless,
breathless superlatives (“Not since Marion Crane took the last shower of her
short life has a horror movie so cruelly, effectively shattered an audience’s
false sense of security,” gushes The AV Club’s A.A. Dowd about
HEREDITARY)-- sometimes it feels like the impact may have been somewhat
heightened by unfamiliarity. When CABIN IN THE WOODS was getting raves from the
likes of The Washington Posts’ Ann Hornaday (“A pulpy, deceivingly
insightful send-up of horror movies that elicits just as many knowing chuckles
as horrified gasps”) and Christopher Orr of The Atlantic (“inventive
cabin-in-the-woods picture since The Evil Dead and the canniest genre
deconstruction since Scream”) one would be forgiven for getting the impression
that it was the first film to ever have a little fun tweaking horror cliches,
as if that old refuge of the scoundrel wasn’t basically as old as the cliches
themselves (hell, JASON X offers satire about equally incisive and a lot less
labored). (CABIN IN THE WOODS is great, of course, but come on). Similarly,
when heaping praise on HEREDITARY and its ilk, the critics --and sometimes
even the filmmakers!-- inevitably cite ROSEMARY’S BABY, THE SHINING, maybe
DON’T LOOK NOW as comparison points. And those are great horror movies,
but one sometimes gets the feeling they’re also the only horror movies these
guys have ever seen. You know, the ones film students watch. It’s easy to say
something is one of the most terrifying horror films of all time!!!! If
you’ve only seen a half-dozen.
This lends a certain
suspicion of smug hipster tourism to the loose movement, maybe not attached to
any specific film, but certainly in the air. Are these Horror movies made by
people who maybe don’t have a lot of affection or exposure to the genre, who just
assume any hack can make a horror film, and consequently anyone who’s seen a
couple Fellini movies should easily be able to beat them at their own game? Is
this like some Brooklyn hipster who owns 36 Chambers and The Low End
Theory and figure that pretty much qualifies them to be a rapper?
 |
| Oh, you make horror movies? That's cool I guess. I like to unmake horror movies. It isn't as played out. |
But while I’m willing to
give their intentions the benefit of the doubt, I’m less able to overlook that
being well-intentioned is no substitute for being well-versed. While
these movies tend to be well-crafted (sensitively acted, handsomely
photographed, effectively edited), they often seem to rely on some pretty
threadbare horror staples, without any apparent awareness of just how
played-out these tricks can be. The pioneers of the horror revolution (Fessenden,
Ti West, Lucky McKee, Benson & Moorhead, even directors like Adam Wingard,
David Buckner, John Fawcett) had ambitions to explore new frontiers in horror,
try new things. They made films like JUG FACE,
THE SACRAMENT, POP SKULL, THE WOMAN,
things that maybe didn’t necessarily work all the time, but clearly
aspired to forge some new territory, experiment with new techniques, construct
new icons. The more recent crop, by contrast, seem to have a slightly different
goal; they have ambitions to make well-crafted cinema, but not
necessarily to invent anything new. Their films feel ambitious because
they’re slow and careful and atmospheric and attentive to character drama, but
how ambitious can a horror film really be if it is content to recycle the same
basic horror shticks that have been around since time began, just slowed down?
At their worst, as Mr. Majestyk puts it, “They just feel like a collection of
atmospheric tricks that make them feel deeper than they really are, but without
any real meat on their bones. They’re too tasteful to shock, too serious to
entertain, too obviously symbolic to get under the skin. They feel like horror
made for and by dilettantes. I’ve seen everything they attempt done with half
the pretension and twice the crowd-pleasing”
**********************
Part II: The Actual Review Of Hereditary
I preface my simple
review of HEREDITARY with all this backstory, not because the movie itself
deserves to be made a poster boy for a minor trend in horror movies which has
been brewing for nearly 20 years, but simply because I cannot otherwise express
the overwhelming ambivalence I feel towards a film which is, in many way, very
very good indeed. A film, in fact, which occasionally even touches greatness,
and yet somehow never adds up to more than OK.
There are a lot of ways
in which it excels, most notably in its cast, who are uniformly excellent, with
Toni Collette in particular laying it all on the table in a performance which
fearlessly flirts with out-and-out mega-acting (in a good way). And it’s
crucial that the cast is so good, because for a long time, the movie is mostly
a prickly, despairing family drama about the Graham family, and the
mostly-unstated threads of alienation, guilt, and resentment which are making
their lives miserable and hollow. Annie (Collette, xXx: THE RETURN OF XANDER
CAGE) has just experienced the death of her mother, by all accounts a
difficult, mentally unstable woman with whom she had long periods of
estrangement. Annie seems more than a bit brittle and unstable herself, but
appears able enough to at least keep up the rough appearance of normalcy for her
calmly checked-out husband (Gabriel Byrne, GOTHIC, whose appearance in the movie is by itself
reason to regard it with utmost skepticism****), her teenage slacker son (Alex
Wolff, MY FRIEND DAHMER), and her weirdo 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly
Shapiro, in her film debut). The family gives every outward aspect of being
able to indefinitely maintain this hollow veneer of emotional functionality,
until they suffer a second sudden tragedy, which gives each family member a
decisive shove towards their distinct individual dysfunctions, and before long
the seams start to show. And that’s when it starts to become clear that for
some reason witches are fucking with them using magic.
I had been told that
director Ari Aster was a drama director making his first entry into horror with
this film, but looking back at his history of short films, that isn’t exactly
true; while maybe not horror, exactly, his button-pushing 2011 incest
drama THE STRANGE THING ABOUT THE JOHNSONS should be ample evidence all by
itself that his interest always lay in making audiences anxious and
uncomfortable. That inclination is in strong effect in HEREDITARY, which mines
most of its tension from the silently fracturing family, and particularly the
escalating inability of mom to hold together and pretend to be OK. Colette
brazenly goes all-in on the portrait of a woman simultaneously repressing her
raging inner turmoil and spiraling out of control into a panicked, self-hating
frenzy. A handful of times, she goes full Nic Cage with a fury that we’re
subsequently never unaware is roiling away just below the surface, waiting for
another opportunity to explode. It is, frankly, a performance which flirts with
over-the-top camp (and may well cross that line if you’re not on the movie’s
wavelength) but, for my money, maintains just enough control to lend the
relentlessly solemn direction a jolt of jagged, unpredictable energy. Even
before anything the least bit unnatural has occurred, the movie draws its ample
source of lacerating emotional anxiety from the psychological demolition derby
into which Colette is throwing herself and everyone around her.
Still, there’s a subtle
difference between lacerating emotional anxiety and actual horror. For much of
the movie, it’s content to simply evoke ROSEMARY’S BABY by enveloping its
characters in a vaguely uneasy paranoid swirl which plays on their
vulnerabilities and slowly breaks them down. But surprisingly, the movie pivots
hard towards straight-up horror for its climax, maybe even its entire final
act, dropping all pretense that this is some sort of subjective mental
breakdown and diving whole hog into a generous sampling of standard witch movie
tricks of the trade. And on one hand, I can’t help but feel magnanimus towards
a deadly serious family drama with an A-list cast that’s willing, even eager,
to straight up turn into Rob Zombie’s LORDS OF SALEM at the last minute.
Alas, on the other hand, herein lies the
problem: it certainly commits to being a horror movie, and makes a real effort
towards being a shocking and scary one. But it contains not a single image you
couldn’t find in LORDS OF SALEM, and it offers a lot less of them. And
so Mr. Majestyk’s prophetic words come back to haunt us: “I’ve seen everything
they attempt done with half the pretension and twice the crowd-pleasing.”
There’s no way around it, the fundamental impact of seeing a bunch of naked old
pagans and a skittering, impossibly-moving possessed person is no deeper or
more profound in HEREDITARY than it is in widely-acknowledged trash like LORDS
OF SALEM or THE POSSESSION OF HANNAH GRACE or whatever. And while it may be
more artfully executed, I don’t really know that it’s better
executed; fundamentally, it’s the exact same bag of tricks, working exactly the
same way. There’s just less of it, perhaps as a concession to good taste,
perhaps simply through lack of imagination or lack of exposure to LORDS OF SALEM.
It’s pretty, but it’s still the same old witch movie shit.
I enjoy that sort of
thing, of course, and I enjoyed it here; Aster and his frequent cinematographer
Pawel Pogorzelski (Camera intern, WATER FOR ELEPHANTS) make excellent use of
long, achingly quiet camera movements to effectively undersell the usual
eldritch grotesqueries, Colin Stetson’s (Saxophone and lyricon on the ARRIVAL
score) music handily conjures pit-of-the-stomach dread, and Grace Yun’s
(FIRST REFORMED) oppressive production design lends a suffocating, nightmarish
air without abandoning realism in any specific way you could put your fingers
on. But there’s no way around it: these are the exact same ingredients, working
towards the exact same goals, as LORDS OF SALEM. And if you had to pick between
the two, wouldn’t you prefer the version where Bigfoot worships a giant neon
cross, and there’s an evil baboon statue, and what looks like an ambulatory
oven-basted turkey waddling around, to the one with just the basics? For me,
the answer is obvious. HEREDITARY’s horror game feels like one of those
restaurants in Northwest DC which exist exclusively so political insiders can
buy crazy expensive dinners for wealthy visiting Midwesterners while at the
same time being careful not to expose them to anything that will be unfamiliar
and scary. It’s a $35 meatloaf entree; certainly tasty enough, and prepared
with an uncommon artistry, but still basically just a fancy version of the same
damn thing. And in much smaller portions. Hats off for the gnarly decapitation,
though.
The obvious retort is
that sure, we all love Bigfoot cameos and shit, but the whole point of spending
most of HEREDITARY in a state of fraught emotional tension is that it invests
in its characters and their inner lives significantly more than most horror
movies, and consequently the impact of the horror is heightened without needing
to throw the kitchen sink at the audience. We’re here to focus on psychology
and philosophy, and subtly threading these themes into the story will deepen
the experience, frighten us on a more profound, richer level. This certainly can
be done; indeed, every aspiring young horror filmmaker who cites THE
EXORCIST or THE SHINING, with their endlessly unsolvable mysteries of human
frailty, is angling to do just that. But alas, it is here that the bottom drops
out of HEREDITARY, and it manages to lurch from some very solid drama to some
very solid horror and still end up with less than the sum of its parts. The
drama is good. The horror is good. But there’s surprisingly little thematically
which links them; they feel distinct and parallel, yoked together through
superficial narrative contrivance rather than deep-rooted textual necessity.
Unlike THE BABADOOK, which finds its crushing psychological frenzy intrinsically
linked to its creeping horror, HEREDITARY feels compartmentalized,
disconnected. It’s a tense familial drama with a horror movie stuck on the end,
rather than a sleek vehicle of unease which manifests its central anxiety in
ever-more-overt ways.
Nowhere is this clearer
than in Collette’s character; [Minor SPOILERS follow] she dominates the
movie, and while it expends a not-insubstantial amount of screentime on Alex
Wolff’s character, I think anything less than calling her the clear protagonist
would be disingenuous. It is primarily her emotional struggle that motivates
the conflict of the movie, she is unambiguously the center around which the
rest of the film revolves, and even if those two things were not so --and they
very much are-- Collette’s performance is just so spectacularly dialed up
louder than everyone else that any possibility of this being read as some sort
of ensemble drama is flatly erased. The film is fundamentally, inexorably,
about her. And yet, at exactly the point the film lurches from vague dread to
clear-cut horror, she functionally vanishes from the movie, and all her thorny
personal idiosyncrasies --which the movie is absolutely fixated on for
most of its runtime-- entirely vanish with her, unresolved. Her ambivalent
feelings about motherhood, her increasing agitation over a looming deadline at
her work, her desperate, helpless desire to believe that there is some hidden
reprieve from the debilitating pain of her loss... --in other words, the bulk
of the film’s runtime-- none of it has any meaningful impact on the climax
whatsoever. To the extent that any of it turns out to be relevant at all, it is
in the most purely expository, incidental narrative way, and consequently
nearly ever bit of the substantial impact it manages to exert in the body of
the film evaporates into nothing right as the film is trying to gear up for its
finale.
This imparts a curiously arbitrary
quality on the movie itself, a sense that this sure does end up being a lot of
extraneous backstory to characters who, when you get right down to it, are
basically just random victims of a sinister conspiracy, and only barely grasp
what’s happening to them, let alone have any hope of fighting it. It doesn’t
really matter if Annie is worried about her career or if her son feels guilty
about their relationship; the same thing would have happened to them if they
were relentlessly cheerful and open about their feelings. Their problem turns
out not to be alienation and psychological trauma so much as it is... witches.
Frustratingly, the movie
is clearly aware of this, and I say “clearly” in the sense that it all but
patiently explains it out loud. It has one of those inevitable classroom scenes
where the topic they’re discussing just happens to be incredibly germaine to
the movie’s theme, and in this case, that takes the form of a conversation on
the concept of “fate” in Greek tragedies, and the question of whether having no
control over your ultimate doom is more or less tragic than a downfall which is
solely the responsibility of its victim. And just in case you didn’t pick up on
that oh-so-subtle hint, let me point out that Annie is a renowned artist known
for depicting her own biography in tiny, excessively detailed miniature
dioramas, simultaneously suggesting her own fevered desire to control her life,
and the intrusion of imperceptible godlike forces that actually do control
her fate.
Which all adds up to the
film’s preemptive defense against the charge that there can be no stakes without
active protagonists. “Sure, these characters are completely passive victims who
at no point have any ability to save themselves,” it argues, “but isn’t that
really more scary? After all, fear is fundamentally about a loss of
control, right?” This theory motivates the whole affair; HEREDITARY is overtly,
inescapably invested in the idea that true horror is about the total loss of
control, and especially about stripping that control from people who are
vitally fixated on trying to maintain it. I mean, it’s in the movie’s title;
this is a movie about the inevitability of doom, and the utter hopelessness of any attempt to subvert fate. Aster is, essentially, betting the entire movie on
inexorable fate being the supreme primal fear.
But unfortunately, I’d
have to disagree with him on that one; having no control over your fate is
arguably more tragic, but it’s certainly not more frightening. Where’s
the suspense in a fixed fight?***** If this was all inevitable no matter what
the characters did, what was the point in spending so much time telling us what
they did? It’s no more terrifying than watching a character gradually die of an
incurable disease. It might make for interesting drama, but it doesn’t add up
to a very good theoretical foundation for horror.
Alas, then, that the
movie ends up abandoning that drama just when it counts the most. Because
even if gloomy fatalism was the same as gut-wrenching horror (and it
most emphatically is not) it doesn’t matter, because whatever you think of the
horror, the film is unquestionably better as a drama, and that gets thrown
overboard along with everything else by the film’s finale. And that’s a real
shame, because Colette’s portrait of the repressed, guilty, ambivalent mother
is too good to just throw away as an aside. And it’s especially too good to
just wheel out as a tiresome feint that maybe this is all in her head
(fortunately, the movie never really tries to push this wearying notion, it
just drops that bit of exposition and lets you do with it as you will.) There
is certainly no shortage in the world of films about wealthy middle-aged white
people who are experiencing anxiety and alienation, but then again, there’s
also no shortage of films about malicious witches, and HEREDITARY is better as
the former than the latter, and too hopeless fragmented for the two to
harmoniously co-exist. And unfortunately, bailing on the drama at the last
minute leaves the climax of the film hopelessly undernourished, while the
impressive head of steam Colette has been diligently working up evaporates
silently and ignominiously before our eyes.
I’ll leave you with one
little synecdochial detail that I feel neatly embodies the underlying problem
here. As I alluded to earlier, part of Annie’s deepening panic is due to her
career: she has an upcoming art show, and she’s behind on her work, so she
keeps getting worried calls from the gallery managers wondering if she’ll be
finished on time. No problem there, of course; there’s a rich tradition of
horror movie protagonists who are boxed in by their work and simply don’t have
the time to be haunted, adding another source of strain (See, for
example, LOVELY MOLLY,
DRAG ME TO HELL, THE BABADOOK). But HEREDITARY completely undermines this easy
mechanic in a mess of confusing details. For one thing, Annie is already super
rich, her husband is super rich, and even if missing a deadline here gets her
fired from art forever (?) she’s obviously going to be just fine. Secondly,
despite the stress of being haunted, if anything, Annie is just spending more
time working than she normally would. If she’s pressed for time, it
certainly has nothing to do with what’s been happening to her, and it’s hard to
see what she could possibly be doing differently. And finally, despite their
check-ins, the people running the show are, like, super sympathetic and
accommodating, they keep offering her more time and reminding her that she
needs to take care of herself, and that whatever happens they’ll make it work.
It’s literally the lowest-stress scenario imaginable. If she thinks being rich
and working from home at your own pace on a passion project on a flexible
timeline is so overwhelming, man, she oughtta try a night shift at McDonalds
sometime.
This is obviously not
some kind of boneheaded oversight by Aster, of course; the point here is that
the pressure she feels is a product of her own mind, not a product of her
circumstances. Which is perfectly fine as far as it goes, I suppose, but now
we’ve spent a significant subplot making a scenario less relatable, less
anxiety-producing, and less relevant to the main plot, all in the service of
telling us something already evident from Colette’s performance, which doesn’t
end up being germaine to the film’s conclusion anyway. Like so much about the
movie, it is, by itself, a well-considered and finely executed bit of character
work. But a plot is a complex machine, and when you drop this ornate little bit
of clockwork into the plot as a whole, it doesn’t mesh with the other gears at
all, they strain against each other, push in different directions, and bring
the whole enterprise to a grinding halt. There, you see what I’ve done, just
like HEREDITARY, I’ve created a metaphoric miniature simulacrum for the plot as
a whole. Aren’t I clever?
But still, the acting is
really good, and the film is aces at evoking a disquieting atmosphere of
implacable anxiety. There’s plenty to praise. Like the family at its center,
HEREDITARY certainly looks elegant and functional, but underneath the
sheen, there’s a surprising emptiness which only really becomes clear once it's
pushed out of its comfort zone into areas which do not play to its strengths.
We often think of great cinema as a collection of finely crafted ingredients; a
great film is defined by having incisive writing, evocative acting, handsome
photography, and so on. And this is what so many of these post-BABADOOK films
are banking on, that horror, as an artform, can be elevated by a focus on
stately, fine-tuned craftsmanship. But a work of art is not, in the end, simply
a sum of its parts, any more than a fine meal is merely a matter of assembling
a pile of choice ingredients; the parts must function as a whole, and the whole
must be judged not by its components, but by how well those components function
together to achieve a harmonious aim. And finally, of course, by the worth of
that aim in itself. HEREDITARY, alas, focuses all its efforts on crafting its
parts --and very fine parts they are, by and large-- but seems less interested
in the way they work together. Consequently, its apparent strengths end up
working against each other, and the harder it works, the less impact it makes.
And besides, even if the whole did work, its final goal is just to be another
witch-possession movie, and not even a very colorful one at that. Artistic
ambition is a fine thing, and I am unable to wholly disregard the self-evident
ambition on display here. But ambition is only so useful as the design to which
it aquits its energies, and, alas, in this case I fear it is almost entirely
misspent.
But hey, I’ll still
probably check out the sequel. Horror fans like Mr. Majestyk and me might still
have reservations about the wisdom of letting the cool kids crash our party,
but fortunately, we’ll still watch pretty much anything.
FIN
* It is not, however, completely unprecedented:
THE EXORCIST was nominated for Best Picture in 1973, but it was also the #1
grossing movie that year, so they kinda had to. JAWS was also nominated for
Best Picture in 1976, and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS actually won in 1991, if you
consider those horror movies (I don’t). And I’d forgotten this, but did you
know THE SIXTH SENSE was nominated for Best Picture in 2001? Just like
EXORCIST, though, it was a huge hit, the second highest-grossing movie of that
year after STAR WARS EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE.
** It actually makes me think of that report a few years
back that a full 30% of World Bank Policy Reports had never been downloaded
even a single time. It makes you wonder if there are movies sitting on Netflix
right now that literally no one on Earth except the editor have ever actually
watched all the way through. If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it,
does it make a sound?
*** Not entirely unique, however; 2001 also gave us
TROUBLE EVERY DAY and SESSION 9, which are, if anything, more successful
attempts at subtle, arty horror than WENDIGO is. 2001 was mostly in the
business, however, of producing things like JASON X, ELVIRA’S HAUNTED HILLS,
ROUTE 666, THE ATTIC EXPEDITIONS, WISHMASTER 3, HORRORVISION, DEMONICUS and so
on. Outside the US, to be sure, things were a bit better: we had Kiyoshi
Kurosawa’s KAIRO (PULSE), Sion Sono’s SUICIDE CLUB, Takashi Miike’s ICHI THE
KILLER, and Guillermo Del Toro’s THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE, but there’s no question
that US horror was in a serious slump.
**** Don’t worry, I love Gabriel Byrne too. But look at
his filmography for a second. Can you think of any actor who is consistently as
good, and yet has been in so many disappointing and crappy movies? I know he’s
in MILLERS CROSSING and all that, but the guy’s gotta have the single worst
miss-to-hit ratio of any A-list actor in history.
***** Or, if you prefer, as per our discussion in DOWNRANGE,
the difference between a slasher and a torture porn flick. They may share many
elements -- a colorful psycho creatively massacring a bunch of pretty young
women-- but their central mechanics are spectacularly different, defined
entirely by the victims’ potential to escape their predicament.
CHAINSAWNUKAH
2018 CHECKLIST!
Searching For Bloody
Pictures
TAGLINE
|
Evil Runs In The Family, which is both an
appealingly lowbrow tagline for this and kinda a spoiler
|
TITLE ACCURACY
|
Sure, it works.
|
LITERARY ADAPTATION?
|
No
|
SEQUEL?
|
None (as of now. But a
75 million buck box-office says that we can expect at the very least a DTV
sequel someday)
|
REMAKE?
|
None
|
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN
|
USA
|
HORROR SUB-GENRE
|
Possession, Witches,
Family Drama
|
SLUMMING A-LISTER?
|
Toni Collette,
|
BELOVED HORROR ICON?
|
Gabriel Byrne, and you
know, between this, THE SIXTH SENSE, THE NIGHT LISTENER, FRIGHT NIGHT REMAKE,
and KRAMPUS, I’d say that Collette has some real horror credentials too. But
she probably had too diversified a filmography to really be an icon.
|
NUDITY?
|
Lots, but I hope you’re
into weird old people doing satan stuff if you rent it for the nudity.
|
SEXUAL ASSAULT?
|
No
|
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!
|
No, but warning, a dog
gets killed.
|
GHOST/ ZOMBIE /
HAUNTED BUILDING?
|
No
|
POSSESSION?
|
Yes
|
CREEPY DOLLS?
|
None
|
EVIL CULT?
|
Yes.
|
MADNESS?
|
Nah
|
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?
|
Yes
|
VOYEURISM?
|
There’s a curious zoom
into a dollhouse to start the film, which lends a hint of voyeurism to the
whole thing. Plus I guess witches are watching them, but the movie doesn’t
seem to really do much with that.
|
MORAL OF THE STORY
|
Sometimes you’re just
fucked for no reason, and there’s nothing you can do about it, and you can
try or not, it really doesn’t matter. You know, white-knuckled terror.
|
