There’s no denying the technical skill that filmmaker Ari Aster possesses, but I wish I enjoyed Hereditary more than I did overall. Toni Collette was BONKERS AWESOME – she could retire TODAY and go out on an extremely high note and if she’s not bestowed with an Oscar nomination, well, that’ll be a crime.
She sold the lunatic material with unwavering dedication and insane intensity, ratcheting up nearly every single scene into a fever-pitched crescendo of genre thrills and chills. I’ve long been a fan of her as an actress, and here, she’s just totally wild to behold.
She’s also very funny in an odd way at key points in the narrative; credit goes to Aster’s tonally interesting screenplay in that he could find laughs ANYWHERE in his pitch-black screenplay.
The big problem for me was – I spent too much time trying to make sense of what I was watching to ever get fully invested, and because the film isn’t “scary” in the traditional sense (it’s more of a prolonged sense of projected dread with a gory-disturbing final act) I kept wondering where everything was going…and then I couldn’t make sense of it all when it unfolded, and one major plot point makes absolutely no sense and could have been re-written before production in order to make sense and that just annoyed me.
I hate having to read stuff online in order to fully decipher the film I’ve just experienced; too many things just didn’t add up to me when the full-reveal occurred during the denouement.
Also, Gabriel Byrne, as awesome as he is – dude is 68 years old – he seemed to be a bit miscast against the 45-year-old Collette. And Alex Wolff looked NOTHING like their offspring; this is the guy who played Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in Peter Berg’s Patriots Day. Bizarre casting.
The film is also NOTHING like the absolutely eye-ball-scorching trailer; A24 wisely sold the movie as one thing and delivered an entirely different thing. Not the first time this has happened, not the last time it’ll happen, and at the end of the day, I don’t really care, but I bet it pissed Joe and Jane Popcorn off big-time.
Available on Blu-ray/DVD and via various streaming providers.
Hereditary
Summary
Hereditary definitely contains some visually arresting moments and is certainly worth seeing, but I can’t help but feel that the mega-hype wasn’t warranted. Compared to something like The Witch – yeah – I’ll take Black Phillip.
