Filmic Friday 306: Hereditary

In Which I Have Withstood The Spooks

A couple weeks ago, I watched a real-deal, actual-factual Horror Movie - Hereditary.

Yes, everyone already reviewed this movie.

Yes, everyone mispronounces it as "Heredity".

No, I don't care.

We had a choice between Hereditary and Midsommer, but at the last second, we chose Hereditary, and I'm glad we did.

This is a movie where you really do have to sit through the whole thing to even begin to understand it, because every part of the movie is interdependent, and nothing is random (though a lot is left to chance in the plot, but I'll get to that later...). So yeah, if you're gonna watch this movie, you really do need to watch it, or you run the risk of being confused. You're not stupid - it's a complex film. Maybe a little too complex for its own good...

Hereditary starts off as a movie about mourning and coping with loss. A mother of two has lost her own mother, and she tries burying herself in her work (she's an artist who makes miniatures) to cope with her complicated feelings. Her daughter is a bit odd, but she seems like a weird kid who just does stuff her own way. Her husband is supportive and loving and tries to take care of her and their son, who seems, like most teenagers, wrapped up in his own teenage troubles.

Then things start getting weird.

A desecrated grave, an ill-advised party, a tragedy, and an ill-advised support-group friendship drive this story from the grounded-but-strange to the downright bizarre, and, to be honest, if it weren't for the director informing us of his intentions, I would have no idea whether it was a story of a family becoming horrifically unmoored or a straight-up supernatural thriller, which is a nice headspace to be in, to be honest.

Unfortunately, the director has a very set way you're supposed to interpret the film, which I feel kinda... lessens the impact.

It also feels like two almost completely separate movies that got married halfway through, though that doesn't feel too ungainly. It feels like discovery more than disappointment. See, in the first half there's this rich family drama of people who are bad at coping trying to cope with bad stuff, but then it becomes a really well-shot, unsettling horror movie with some spectacular special effects.

I like that the effects, while gory and well-crafted, aren't used to simply shock everyone. The grisly nature of some effects is upsetting enough that they don't have to linger on the effect itself. The knowledge of what has happened is too dire to ignore.

Really, every part of the movie works well together - the sound design is eerie without being exploitative, the lighting gives the feel of the despair a family would feel on the loss of loved ones, warming only when in the presence of fire, fear, or friends, and the music is effective without being overbearing. When the music is loud, it's behaving as the audience's heartbeat, rising with the tension and action before pulling back. It's nice to have a movie where, even though everyone tends to speak quietly, you can still hear what they're saying.

And then there's the plot.

I'm about to get super spoilery, so if you want to watch the movie, stop reading this review and go watch it, then come back so I can complain about walnuts.

Did you watch it? Do you not care about spoilers? Okay, here we go.

After the grandma has been buried, someone desecrates her grave, which we learn about via a phone call to the dad. The daughter character, Charlie, has a nut allergy and may or may not (absolutely is, according to the director) be the temporary earthly vessel for grandma and her secret cult's favorite demon, Paimon. Yes. This is a secret demon cult movie. No, you don't find out for sure until the last act.

Well, in order to get Paimon out of Charlie and into her brother (who has no idea about any of this), poor Charlie has to die. We are asked, by the end of the movie, to believe that the son is invited to a party where the mom knows there will likely be drinking and/or drugs, but she insists that he take Charlie with her. The mom, at this point, knows nothing about the cult and could reasonably get a babysitter for Charlie (if not just leave her alone, she's old enough to take care of herself, it seems), so this is weird because this party? This party kills Charlie.

See, the son takes Charlie to the party, where for some reason, there are people chopping mountains of walnuts, which Charlie's deathly allergic to. The son does not notice at all and goes to smoke some weed with a girl he likes, urging Charlie to eat the cake which he doesn't know has nuts in it. Charlie, of course, has a reaction and goes to get her brother to take her to the hospital. Instead of calling an ambulance. Ambulances, newsflash, don't give a crap about the presence booze or pot when there's an obvious episode of nut-induced anaphylaxis...

So sonny boy takes Charlie to the car and drives outta there like a bat outta heck. Charlie, meanwhile, is suffocating as her throat closes, so she sticks her head out the window to breathe. There's a sudden deer in the road (a carcass, actually), which causes the son to swerve. Charlie's head is then taken off by a telephone pole.

We are, by the end of this movie, expected to believe that this entire sequence was planned by the cult for the express purpose of freeing Paimon from Charlie's body so they can literally scare the son to death and put Paimon in his body.

This is insane, obviously. Also obvious is the link between all this craziness and mental illness. This could absolutely be a story about a fantastically unfortunate family where they all go crazy one-by-one, but no. Demons.

The jump from "Charlie dies horrifically, but completely by accident" to "A crazy cult of nudist geriatrics wanted a genius demon to come into being through a weird girl and her brother" is a bit too much of a leap, for me, but it's still a really cool movie in spite of the twist.

Overall, I think this movie is incredibly worth watching and  you should check it out.

Really watch it, though, because yeah... that Paimon stuff is hard to follow if you haven't been paying attention the whole time.

I'm proud of myself for only looking away during the decapitations, guys. Yeah, you read that right. There's multiple decapitations. Five, actually. One's a metaphor, though. The four physical decapitations are: Grandma's Corpse, A Dead Pigeon In A Bush, Charlie, and The Mom Via Possession/Piano Wire. The metaphysical decapitation is when the dad is killed - cutting the head from the family.

So yeah, fun, scary, cool movie.

Go watch it!

Go Enjoy Something!
FC

PS: I'm late with the blog due to internet outages - we're having an ice storm :|