Ari Aster (2018)
The first thing we see in Hereditary is a death announcement in a newspaper. Ellen Taper Leigh was in her late seventies, a mother and grandmother. The announcement names her close family and includes details of funeral arrangements. The debutant feature director Ari Aster then cuts to inside a house. His camera watches out through a window then moves back inside, slowly and menacingly. There are ominous crescendi on the soundtrack. The camera closes in on a doll’s house and focuses on one of its meticulously detailed rooms – a bedroom, which becomes an actual bedroom in the house containing the doll’s house. The sudden silence on the soundtrack is as high-impact as the noise it replaces. Aster has made clear in no time that something wicked this way comes. He’s impatient to get on with building horror atmosphere. You wonder why, if he hasn’t time for a slow build-up, he bothered to include the agreeably could-signify-anything obituary at the start, especially as the first scene proper describes Ellen’s family’s preparations, in the creepy house, for her funeral.
This is a supernatural horror movie and the first half hour certainly creates a picture of a world other than our own. Steve Graham (Gabriel Byrne), in a dark suit and tie, enters the aforementioned bedroom to rouse his sixteen-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff). Steve tells Peter his mother is already waiting to go to the funeral. A cut to outside and a car, containing the mother, Annie (Toni Collette), confirms as much. Steve then asks his son if he knows where his younger sister Charlie is, since she doesn’t appear to have slept in her bed. When Steve locates Charlie (Milly Shapiro), she, like Peter, is still in her night things. There can’t be too many parents who, on the morning of a funeral, will wait until they’re ready to leave before they bother checking whether their teenage kids are up yet. It’s particularly surprising in a household presided over by Steve who’s controlling enough to instruct everyone, once they’re back home after the service, to take off their outdoor shoes as soon as they get inside. (Not that he ever does this again.) At the funeral itself, Annie delivers a eulogy to her mother. She describes Ellen as a very private person, with ‘private rituals’, who’d likely have reacted cynically to the large turnout of virtual strangers at the service. Annie speaks with the voice not of a daughter doing her conventional duty but of a scriptwriter (also Aster) who wants quickly to impart suggestive information about (a) the departed Ellen and (b) Annie’s potential for psychological turmoil.
As the funeral service ends, Charlie is eating a confectionery bar. This seems weirdly immature for a thirteen-year-old at a funeral but that’s not the cause of her parents’ concern: they need to be sure the bar doesn’t contain nuts. A few scenes later, Peter wants to go to a party, which he pretends is being organised by his high school. Annie insists that he take the worryingly unsociable Charlie with him: it will be good for her (although she’s not yet high-school age). Annie warns Peter to take care – no alcohol please – but makes no mention of Charlie’s allergy. At the party, Peter and his contemporaries smoke weed. He directs Charlie to a large chocolate cake instead. Neither of them gives a thought to the nut allergy. Charlie eats a piece of cake, duly goes into anaphylactic shock and Peter, high and at high speed, drives her to hospital. She puts her head out of the car window to get some air. When Peter swerves to avoid an animal and crashes, Charlie is decapitated by a telegraph pole.
To Ari Aster, rooting his story in a realm of credibly consistent human behaviour is just a tiresome constraint to be ignored. After all, Hereditary is about the irrational so it doesn’t need to make any sense, right? Between Ellen’s and Charlie’s funerals, a fair number of spooky things have already happened. The family is informed that Ellen’s grave has been desecrated. Annie, a miniaturist artist (doll’s houses her speciality), thinks she sees her mother in her workshop. Charlie receives a visit from an otherworldly light and beheads a dead bird with scissors. Annie goes to a support group for the bereaved, where she reveals the history of mental illness in her family. (This must be why she married Steve, a professional psychotherapist with precious little else to recommend him.) It’s after Charlie’s death, however, that Hereditary‘s horror show gets into full swing. Once it does, there’s no reason for it to end (and the film, at 127 minutes, is very long). Aster is full of ideas or, at least, has probably seen plenty of horror movies. His only problem is that he eventually runs out of personnel with which to continue.
In my limited experience of the genre, the supposed highlights are often things horrible to behold rather than horrifying conceptions. That’s certainly the case with this film, with Charlie’s head a main contender for the grisliest image prize. There’s an occasional unnerving, well-constructed sequence. Annie, an habitual somnambulist, goes into Peter’s bedroom; he tells her she’s sleepwalking and she comes to; in the conversation that follows, she expresses violently negative feelings towards him and he is terrified; Annie then wakes in bed, having dreamed it all, the sleepwalking included. There’s an occasional funny line. Annie makes a macabre discovery in the attic and starts gabbling out a summary to Steve. She then warns him, as he prepares to go up to check things out, that there’s more than what she’s so far said. ‘More? You mean more than the headless body of your mother?’ he replies, with weary sarcasm. But Annie’s right, of course – there is more, much more …
The continuing supply of bizarre sights and incidents induces shock-horror fatigue. It may be different for viewers who think they’ve experienced the supernatural. For those of us who haven’t, such things happen only in fiction or on a movie screen and need to consist of more than technical aplomb to get under our skin. Just about the only parts of Hereditary that do that are exchanges between Annie and Joan (Ann Dowd), a woman from the bereavement support group. Joan, who gives Annie a DIY mediumship kit, is eventually revealed to be a key participant in Ellen’s ‘private rituals’, about which her daughter learns more and more. (Ellen and Joan belonged to the same coven.) But Ann Dowd is humanly convincing while Joan is cultivating Annie’s acquaintance and offering her sympathy. When Dowd and Toni Collette, fine actresses both, are portraying the helpless grief of women who’ve lost their children, it’s upsetting like nothing else in the film.
In this kind of material, characterisation is at best of secondary importance and at worst no more than a red herring. In spite of that, Collette’s acting is remarkably committed: she has some furiously powerful outbursts in which her emotions feel very raw. It’s regrettable she’s not given more opportunity to shape her portrait of Annie, who’s bad-tempered and miserable from the word go. When, latish on in the film, she weeps to her husband and son, ‘I love you so much’ , you can only think: I missed that bit. The sad-faced Milly Shapiro has the look of a wounded bird even before she takes scissors to the dead one: the melancholy impression Shapiro makes while Charlie’s alive is stronger than any left by her post-mortem appearances, with or without head. Alex Wolff does as well as can be expected with a character whose body ends up hosting the demon Paimon. Gabriel Byrne is even more unlucky. Screen shrinks in earthbound dramas are often miracle workers; in occult settings, they tend to be rationalist Aunt Sallies and this one is no exception. Steve, in spite of that early success with the shoes removal, is so ineffectual that, when he glumly swallowed a handful of tablets and disappeared for a while, I wondered if he’d committed suicide without his wife or son, their minds on other things, having noticed. It turned out Steve really did just want a good night’s sleep. His eventual death is much more spectacular.
Hereditary has been hailed, by Digital Spy for one, as ‘this generation’s The Exorcist’. I never liked or admired the latter film but there was no arguing that the story was underpinned by author William Peter Blatty’s eccentric Catholicism. I’m not sure if Digital Spy means to imply this but Ari Aster has made a film de nos jours in the sense that he exploits the steep decline in traditional belief systems to justify an anything goes approach to horror. What’s more galling about Hereditary is the line being shot that it’s a tragic parable of the nuclear American family in crisis etc. I don’t suppose this is being argued on the grounds of parental carelessness cited in the second and third paragraphs above. It’s probably more a matter of Annie’s being able to design a doll’s house but failing, thanks to her neurotic inheritance, to create a supportive home environment in reality (I’m not sure how her husband’s responsibilities fit in).
It’s a relief to see Mark Kermode, a connoisseur of horror cinema (and Exorcist superfan), give Hereditary a poor review. Plenty of other critics seem keen to get on the bandwagon of its commercial success. (According to Wikipedia, it was made for $10m and has already grossed $62.5m.) I can understand why the film has built up an appeal, perhaps especially with younger audiences, as something you go and see with others and enjoy being (or acting out being) group-scared-out-of-your-wits-by. Maybe the professional reviewers who buy into the hype are like those teachers you remember from school who were anxious to seem to be on the kids’ wavelength. But if they’re not, to paraphrase Larkin in ‘The Old Fools’, why aren’t they screaming at Hereditary – and in anger rather than fear? Over the closing credits, Ari Aster plays Judy Collins’s version of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides, Now’. The (ab)use of this fine song is the one desecration in the film that I think will stay with me.
5 July 2018