Hereditary (2018)

On Wednesday, April 16, 2025, the worst thing that's currently ever happened to me happened. My orange and white tabby cat, Jake, the only pet I've ever had since the age of seven, was put down before my eyes. He was about one month shy of his 19th birthday. It all started with a string of saliva that suddenly materialized out of nowhere, hanging out of his mouth every time he began to eat or drink water. When my mother took him to the vet, he was administered a thoroughly unnecessary (and potentially lethal) rabies shot, the doctor justifying that it was for "their protection," despite the fact that Jake was an indoor cat. From that ill-advised shot (which was admitted to be uncalled-for by his own vet, who wasn't present during this critical period, as well as my aunt, who is also a nurse) onward, Jake's health deteriorated rapidly. He stopped eating, and when he was brought back to the vet, he was given an anti-nausea medication. One day later, he became paralyzed in his back legs, unable to move no matter how desperately he tried to drag himself across the floor.

 

The following day, I knew what was coming. I accompanied my parents with Jake to the vet, knowing this would probably be my last time seeing him. When the doctor pulled Jake out of his cage, she theorized he had developed a blood clot on his spine, and promptly went to fetch the euthanasia. For the first time since I was a child, I cried in front of my parents, standing there in the room, holding tissues up to my eyes and nose. In a matter of minutes, my best friend in the entire world was going to die, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. After the shot was administered to free Jake of his pain, the vet and her assistants left the room to allow my parents and me to say our goodbyes. For I don't know how long, maybe 40 minutes, maybe over an hour, I stood hunched over the examination table, holding Jake's lifeless body in my arms, kissing every part of him: his cheeks, paw pads, arms, chest, and rotund stomach. Snot was dripping from my nose as I sobbed uncontrollably, and even though he was gone, I still wiped the snot off his fur repeatedly. 

After I finally felt strong enough to let Jake go, we returned home with his body, and for the first time in my life, I experienced my first taste of grief. Returning to my house, I felt so cold that I not only kept my jacket on, but zipped it up. I went upstairs into my bedroom, not knowing what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. I felt disoriented. While I'm used to being by myself, I had never felt so alone. Realizing the best thing for me to do was to be with my parents, I determined to go downstairs and sit with them on the living room couch, where I spent the majority of the remainder of the day, moving only for dinner. My parents were able to sustain a casual conversation, but I stayed silent the entire time, tears pouring down my face as I took a bite of my chicken sandwich, my first meal since Jake's passing. 

While the loss of a pet, devastating as it is, could never compare to the life-ruining tragedy of losing a child, it gave me greater personal insight into the body-numbing agony faced by the Graham family in Ari Aster's cleverly written, masterfully shot, hauntingly scored, and all-around powerfully performed supernatural horror masterpiece, Hereditary. Heart-wrenching, visually grotesque, and soaked in suspense, Hereditary is a quiet, somber depiction of a family in crisis that insidiously descends into a nightmarish abyss of demonic possession. For his stunningly assured directorial debut, Aster marries an intimate psychological examination of grief with the visceral, balls-to-the-wall insanity of a supernatural terrorist attack without ever losing sight of the deeply human tragedy at the core of his harrowing story.

In northern Utah, after suffering a prolonged illness, Ellen Taper Leigh (Pat Barnett Carr) passes away in the home of her daughter, Annie Graham (Toni Collette). Annie experienced a tumultuous relationship with her mother, and so her sudden death has left her conflicted about her emotions. "Should I be sadder?" she whispers to her psychiatrist husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), who comfortingly responds, "You should be whatever you are. It'll come." Annie is a miniature artist who constructs dioramas of settings and people from her own life, and she's stressing over meeting the deadline for her upcoming exhibition, which is only six and a half months away. Annie and Steve live in a forested, secluded home with their 16-year-old son, Peter (Alex Wolff), and 13-year-old daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro). The passing of their matriarch casts a cloud of gloom over the Graham household, even though the only one who shared much of a relationship with Ellen was Charlie, whose already-antisocial personality is now exacerbated by the loss of her grandmother. 

As the Grahams attempt to restore normalcy to their everyday lives, a much more shattering tragedy strikes one Friday night when Peter reluctantly takes Charlie to a high school house party at the urging of his mother. When Peter leaves Charlie temporarily to smoke weed with his crush, Bridget (Mallory Bechtel), Charlie eats a slice of chocolate cake, unaware it contains nuts, and goes into anaphylactic shock. As Peter frantically drives her to a hospital, a suffocating Charlie sticks her head out the window for air. To avoid colliding with a deceased deer lying in the middle of the street, Peter swerves off the road, causing Charlie's head to instead collide with a telephone pole, decapitating her. Numb with the horror of what he feels responsible for, a shell-shocked Peter calmly drives home and walks in a daze to bed, allowing his mother to find Charlie's corpse in the morning.

The already tense dynamic of the family worsens. The relationship between Annie and Peter becomes even more strained as Annie holds him responsible for his sister's death, all while struggling with her own guilt over having sent Charlie to the party in the first place. At a grief support group, she meets a fellow grieving mother named Joan (Ann Dowd), who lost her son and grandson in a simultaneous drowning, and the two develop a friendship, united by their shared grief. While out shopping one afternoon, Annie runs into Joan in a parking lot, and Joan informs her of a medium who came to her apartment and conjured the spirit of her grandson. Initially skeptical, Annie accompanies Joan to her apartment and witnesses what appears to be her grandson's spirit making contact. Desperate to be reunited with her daughter and freed from her pain, Annie convinces Steve and Peter to perform the seance with her in their living room, unintentionally welcoming an entity into their home whose hostility, especially toward Peter, suggests a presence far too malicious to really be Charlie.

Ari Aster's emotionally precise and wickedly inventive screenplay accomplishes the daring feat of charting its own path toward a wholly unpredictable conclusion and expressing unabashed affection for classic horror films of yesteryear. The plot contains the unmistakable DNA of three genre classics in particular, blending the demon-worshipping cult of Rosemary's Baby, the demonic possession of The Exorcist, and the portrait of a family struggling to cope with the death of their youngest member of Don't Look Now. Not content to reduce his first foray into the genre that evidently shaped his passion for filmmaking to a derivative pastiche, Aster utilizes his familiar ingredients to concoct an original story about intergenerational trauma and the inescapability of fate while delivering an urgent message about the importance of communication in a family. 

The protagonists are developed into distressingly recognizable human beings through their relatable personalities and individualized reactions to trauma: Annie buries herself in her work, secluding herself within the quiet of her bedroom and toiling away to meet her impending deadline; Peter detaches himself by smoking weed with his best friend, Brendan, while harboring an attraction to Bridget; Charlie takes after her mother, hiding away from the world in the privacy of her bedroom, drawing in a sketchbook and crafting miniature figurines while crunching on chocolate bars and Reese's Pieces; and Steve just wants to keep his family afloat, encouraging communication without forcing it, respecting their choice to bottle up their emotions, and providing a listening ear whenever it's requested. 

From the beginning, the relationship between the Graham family is strained at best, particularly that of Annie and Peter. Aster has envisioned a shocking backstory that provides context for this lack of warmth, smartly parceled out in a confessional conversation between Annie and Joan over tea and a monologue by Annie at her first grief support group meeting. In a brilliantly written and acted passive-aggressive exchange between Annie and Peter, Aster lays bare the butter knife-thick tension that's existed between mother and son for the last couple years. While Annie is constructing a diorama of her house, Peter arrives at her workshop door and asks to borrow one of their cars for the night in the pretense of attending a school barbecue. While no outward displays of hostility manifest, the characters convey their disdain for one another by mocking their verbal deliveries and slinging sly insults at questions asked and responses given. 

The revelation of the supernatural threat plaguing this family is impossible to predict, despite the myriad of clues Aster lays out from start to finish: mysterious names and symbols carved into Charlie's bedroom wall and the telephone pole on which she meets her fate; the sigil on the necklace gifted to Annie by her mother; the welcome mat in front of Joan's apartment, embroidered in a similar fashion to pillows by Ellen. The devil is literally in the details, referenced in an early scene in Peter's history class. While Peter's attention is absorbed by the butt of Bridget sitting in front of him, his teacher is lecturing about Heracles. "So, if we go by the rule that the hero is undone by his fatal flaw, what is Heracles' flaw?" "Arrogance," Bridget answers. "Because he literally refuses to look at all the signs that are being literally handed to him the entire play." "But let's all remember, Sophocles wrote the oracle so that it was unconditional, meaning Heracles never had any choice, right? So, does that make it more tragic or less tragic than if he has a choice?" When Peter is called on to weigh in, he's so distracted by texting Brendan about meeting up after school to smoke pot that he's clueless as to what his teacher is even talking about. Then a girl chimes in, "I think it's more tragic because if it's all just inevitable, then that means that the characters had no hope. They never had hope because they're all just, like, hopeless. They're all like pawns in this horrible, hopeless machine." If only Peter had listened to his classmate's analysis instead of fixating on Bridget and weed because he and his family are soon going to find themselves cogs in the exact same machine as Heracles. 

The final 20 minutes reward the patience demanded by the preceding 106 with an explosively traumatizing home invasion that tethers the demonic possession of The Exorcist to the cult exultation of Rosemary's Baby for a resolution that subverts the slow-building terrorism that characterizes the majority of the movie with an all-out bloodbath of decapitation and immolation. What begins as a quiet, slow walk through a pitch-black home suddenly mutates into a son being chased upstairs into the attic by his screaming, possessed mother, and a demon-worshipping cult loudly chanting in unison "Hail, Paimon!" It's an insanely chaotic tonal switch, albeit one that registers as an inevitable culmination of the torment this family has endured since Annie's birth. This is the antithesis of the feel-good ending of The Conjuring, in which the power of familial love is strong enough to triumph over satanic evil.

In 2000, Toni Collette received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in M. Night Shyamalan's supernatural horror masterpiece, The Sixth Sense, in which she portrayed Lynn Sear, the single mother of Cole struggling to make ends meet with two jobs while suppressing the frustration of a son who refuses to communicate with her. 19 years after breaking hearts with her legendarily moving final scene in her parked car opposite Haley Joel Osment, the role of Lynn seems to have functioned as a training exercise for that of Annie, and Collette demonstrates that her ability as an actress isn't limited to supporting roles. Graduating to a leading position as Annie Graham, a wife and mother of two whose entire life has been beset by one familial tragedy after another, Collette anchors the increasingly bizarre and eerie proceedings in raw, aching humanity with a phenomenal performance of insurmountable heartache and barely suppressed fury and resentment. After Annie's mother dies, this is where we find her at her relative best, Collette capturing Annie's emotional conflict with a coldly detached exterior. She isn't outright happy to be without her mom, yet a part of her is ashamed to admit she feels relieved. During her first meeting with a grief support group, Collette unloads Annie's tempestuous history with her mother with a fast-talking mix of bitterness and sarcasm, concealing a lifetime of suffering behind an ironic chuckle that quickly curdles into crying.

It isn't until the brutal killing of her daughter, however, when Annie's grip on reality finally begins to weaken, necessitating Collette to kick her performance into its highest gear. She captures the deceptively irrational paranoia of Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby and the physical expressions of anguish and helplessness externalized by Ellen Burstyn in The Exorcist, distorting her face into silent screams when confronted with images of indescribable gruesomeness, erupting into a sustained, ear-piercing guttural wail of horror and grief that subsides into a heartrending bout of sobbing. As Annie relays the grisly details of her life-altering discovery to an empathetic ear, Collette speaks in a controlled whisper and fragmentary sentences, straining to choke back her tears. 

For her show-stopping monologue at the dinner table, during which Peter challenges Annie to relieve herself of her resentment toward him, Collette explodes into a fiery torrent of long-held vitriol, the cruelty of her words and shrill ferocity of her volume unable to mask the deep-seated anguish that's engendered them. What's perhaps most moving about this scene is that even after she purges herself, Annie is still unable to eat the food that Steve has cooked her. The release doesn't make her feel any better. All she's done now is make her son feel even worse than he already did. Collette masterfully portrays Annie's inner turmoil of holding onto the remaining vestiges of her crumbling sanity while seeking an easy escape through otherworldly means with manic desperation, her face becoming more and more drained of vitality. 

Matching the force of nature that is Collette beat for beat is Alex Wolff, who presents a mesmerizing portrayal of the human condition's most bitter cocktail: grief and guilt. Many critics, including yours truly, are still up in arms about the Academy's snubbing of Collette for Best Actress on account of her breathtaking performance transpiring within the disqualifying setting of a horror film. Yet no one talks about how Wolff was just as criminally snubbed for Best Supporting Actor. Both actors are submitting the strongest and most demanding performances of their careers. The bulk of the dramatic acting weight in Hereditary rests almost exclusively on their shoulders, and they each carry the burden with emotional expressivity and unencumbered vulnerability. While the story is told primarily from Annie's perspective, Peter becomes the focal point of the antagonists' plot after the inciting incident that sends him into an emotional and physical tailspin. In a lot of ways, Wolff's poignant performance evokes the career-starting supporting performance of Kelvin Harrison Jr. in It Comes at Night, itself also a supernatural horror tale centered around a family.

Peter begins his arc as an ordinary, dissatisfied teenage boy. A burnout with no interest in learning or motivation for anything, Peter's only real hobby consists of smoking weed, whether in the company of his friends or the privacy of his bedroom. He lacks the confidence to talk to Bridget and articulate his feelings for her, preferring the safety of gazing at her from afar and looking at her photos on Facebook. Like most men his age, Peter prefers to contain his emotions, responding to his grandmother's death by lying in bed, plucking strings on his guitar. When asked by his father if he feels sad, he gives a nonchalant "Hmm," and smiles. 

However, once Peter is jolted out of his perpetual reverie by a life-altering car accident, Wolff's face transforms into a mask of torment. His eyes turn red and well with tears. Breath vanishes from his body as it goes numb with shock, reducing his movement to a zombified gait. Like his mother, the life instantly drains from his eyes, leaving him a lethargic shell of his former self, crawling into bed but unable to fall asleep, forever haunted by the memory of what he witnessed and gaslighted into believing he's solely responsible for it. In that sense, Peter is placed in a similar psychological situation to Heather Donahue from The Blair Witch Project, who herself was gaslighted by the titular witch into believing that she got herself and her fellow documentarians lost in the Black Hills Forest, when in reality, they were marked for death the second they set foot therein. Wolff carries the weight of crushing remorse and self-loathing in little more than static close-ups of his lifeless face, looking as though he's eternally enslaved in a half-sleep/half-awake state of enforced existence. Once he finds himself targeted by a malicious force granted unintended access to his home, Wolff dissolves into a hysterical ball of panic, expertly conveying palpable fear through hyperventilation and instances of unabashed, out-loud bawling. He reverts to a childlike vulnerability, slack-jawed, tears cascading down his face as though his eyes were a faucet.

While Collette and Wolff carry the bulk of the acting in Hereditary the same way Jason Miller and Ellen Burstyn did in The Exorcist, the surrounding trio of performances are not to be overlooked. In a role that could have come across as blandly detached in the hands of a less talented actor, Gabriel Byrne provides an emotional counterpoint and pillar of strength to the more outwardly expressive Collette and Wolff. The reason for that is obvious: unlike Annie, Steve didn't come from a background rooted in trauma and death, and unlike Peter, he isn't harboring the guilt of having abandoned his loved one, leading to their accidental poisoning. As a result, Steve has the relative luxury of being able to sit back and contend with his life's setbacks reasonably. Though it isn't made explicitly clear in the movie, Steve is a psychiatrist, and it registers in the personality with which Byrne invests him: levelheaded, rational, composed, compassionate, and understanding. Steve is always available to lend a listening ear or a shoulder to cry on, but for the sake of keeping his family's head above water, he withholds his own emotions to a progressively toxic endpoint. 

Byrne gives him a soft, cultured voice, tinged with an irrepressible Irish accent, at no point raising it to express the anger boiling within. Instead, he swallows it behind gritted teeth, evinced when he finds Annie making a diorama of Charlie's death. The compassion and patience that characterize Steve slowly melt away, replaced by a coldness and contempt for what he believes are the psychotic actions of his increasingly unhinged wife. His most silently devastating moment occurs the first night after Charlie's death. He comes into her empty bedroom, sits on the edge of her bed, and flips through pages of her sketchbook. For the first time, Steve is taking notice of his daughter's talent for drawing, until he comes across a blank page. Never will these pages be filled out. It isn't until Steve glimpses his son in his rearview mirror sleeping in his backseat, his nose bandaged after he apparently smashed his face into his desk, and nearly runs a red light that he finally allows himself the cathartic release of crying quietly to himself, no longer able to suppress the gravity of the ground splitting open beneath his feet. To reflect Steve's breaking point with Annie, Byrne uses a sardonic delivery and emotionless eyes.

If Ruth Gordon was not only nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her adorably sinister performance as Minnie Castevet, but went home with the bronze statuette in hand, then Ann Dowd is substantially more deserving of having at least received a nomination thereof. Similar to Allison Williams in Get Out, Dowd is tasked with performing two distinct personalities within one character. Initially, Joan presents herself to Annie as a fellow grieving mother and grandmother who attends the same support group to share her profound sadness over the alleged loss of her son and grandson. The reveal of her true nature and motivations should be predictable to anyone who's seen Rosemary's Baby, her role clearly modeled after Minnie, but Dowd disarms with a pitch-perfect performance. As the heartbroken, lonely companion, Dowd earns trust with her intrinsically warm, maternal, comforting presence. She bursts with the newfound hope and exuberance of a freshly converted believer in the occult, and save one surreal instance in which Joan screams at Peter to "get out" of his own body, inaudible to everyone else around him, Dowd maintains her sweet, soothing voice to the very end. This role was obviously written for her in particular, as no other actress could have breathed such invigorating, emotionally manipulative new life into such an archetypal character.

In her first feature role, Milly Shapiro uses uneasy body language to convey Charlie's intrinsic discomfort in her own skin. Charlie is more of an unsettling presence than a fully dimensional character, a walking collection of bizarre quirks: she prefers to sleep in her treehouse rather than her bedroom, even when it's freezing outside; her wardrobe consists invariably of an orange hooded sweatshirt; she steals a pair of scissors from her classroom to decapitate a deceased bird and use its head for a figurine; she absentmindedly clicks her tongue out of nowhere, resulting in the signature sound of Hereditary; and, her sole relatable trait, she's a chocoholic. Socially speaking, Charlie makes Carrie White seem like a butterfly. She's clearly on the spectrum, evinced by her special-needs classmates and antisocial personality. Her only friend appears to have been her grandmother, and her passing has left Charlie in a melancholic daze.

Shapiro plays her as an outsider who doesn't belong in the world into which she's been born, almost like an alien who crash-landed into Earth and was adopted by a human family. When in the presence of a teacher or even her own family, Shapiro gives a jittery, morose performance, fidgeting nervously with her hands and avoiding eye contact. Her eyes emanate a deep sadness and ill-defined anxiety. Charlie exists in her own private bubble, disconnected from the world around her. She's uninterested in socialization and unresponsive to gestures of affection, as evinced when Annie tries to console her on her first night without her grandmother, to no avail. Charlie may be a one-note role, not allowing for much range, but Shapiro plays it well, and her physical acting in her final scene, where she's required to trace the effects of an allergic reaction, from initial confusion, gulping, and panicked wheezing to kicking her legs and grasping her throat while gasping for air, is empathetically agonizing enough to deliver the gut punch intended for her brutal, unexpected exit. 

For the soulful, contemplative opening half of Hereditary, Aster impregnates every inch of his frames with a funereal gloominess that captures the post-funeral melancholy with pinpoint precision. Even though Ellen Leigh is deceased before the introduction, her presence casts a pall of disquiet over the Graham household. The family may return home after her funeral, but they don't return unaffected to their ordinary lives. When Annie turns the light off in her workshop, she glimpses her mother standing in the corner, smiling at her. As soon as she turns the light back on, the corner is vacant. Aster is letting us know from the jump that we're not in the presence of a conventional, unadulterated family drama. The actors deliver their lines in hushed tones. Aster sets a pace that's grippingly slow to submerge his audience from head to toe in the shared psychological plight of his characters, never in a rush to cut to the next scene or deliver the next shocking piece of the puzzle. He maintains a steadfast focus on his characters to inspire empathy and convey their apprehension. Once he reaches the point of no return, Aster ratchets up the intensity and nerve-racking sense of dread explosively. 

From a technical perspective, Aster approaches his debut feature with a fully developed understanding of how to use the camera as a conduit for generating atmosphere and tension. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski favors slow pans across empty domestic spaces to symbolize the emptiness felt by the Graham family and zoom-ins on gruesome images to let the sensation of horror seep into our bones. Together, these two craftsmen create visuals so grotesque, cringe-inducing, violent, and blasphemous that they sear themselves into your brain and never fade away. During perhaps the greatest nightmare sequence ever committed to celluloid, Pogorzelski pedestals his camera up from the base of Peter's bed to slowly reveal a swarm of black ants consuming his motionless body as he sleeps, crawling along his face, pouring out of his mouth, scattering across his pillow. He pans the camera slowly across the charred corpse of Steve in front of the fireplace, identified mainly by an upraised hand displaying his wedding ring. He films Wolff's face in a series of extreme close-ups to accentuate his mind-numbing grief and all-consuming self-loathing. For the decapitation set piece, he holds the camera on his face in a long take to visualize his feeling frozen in time, his eyes pinned to the windshield, paralyzed. As Peter raises his eyes to his rearview mirror to confirm his worst fear, so too does Pogorzelski tilt his camera to the side of the rearview before quickly descending back to the road. Peter can't bear to look at his sister's headless body in the backseat, and neither can the camera. In a wide shot of Peter sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark, Annie is glimpsed in the background, wedged in the upper corner of the wall. Peter turns his head to the right in the foreground, and in the background, Annie slithers in the air out the door. 

On the night of Charlie's death, editors Jennifer Lame and Lucian Johnston dissolve from a shot of Peter climbing into bed to a close-up of his face the next morning, lying on his side, numb with shock and fatigue. In the distance, we can hear Annie walking to her car to shop for balsa wood, Peter's dread becoming ours. At first, Collette gasps, then lets out a prolonged, inhuman howl. Wolff's eyes widen ever so slightly, and without warning, Lame and Johnston smash cut to a close-up of Charlie's severed, bloody head lying on the side of the road, covered in ants, one eye swollen shut, her tongue exposed.

Once Annie is consumed by Paimon, she levitates through the attic and saws her head off with piano wire, her eyes cast down at a slack-jawed Peter in a demonic glare. The editors cut to a close-up of Collette's wide eyes, reflective of the deep-seated resentment she'd been harboring toward him. On a couple occasions, Pogorzelski uses his camera to add menace to otherwise nonviolent scenes, like an overhead shot of Charlie walking in a trancelike state in her backyard, carrying a severed bird head, or an upside-down shot of Annie walking down the hallway to Joan's apartment that seamlessly flips right-side up once her head reaches the center of the frame. 

To shroud the cultists in mystery, he films them in wide shots so their identities remain elusive and interchangeable. Who these people are as individuals doesn't matter; it's the cult to which they've forfeited their individuality and the horrific machinations they're engineering against our protagonists. One woman stands across the street from Charlie's school and waves menacingly to her while flashing a creepy, pedophiliac smile. Penetrating the blackness of a closet doorway is the naked body of a blond man, who stands still and smiles at Peter in a shot translated seemingly directly from a nightmare. Another woman who resembles Ellen sits outside on the lawn between a line of fire. The heater in the treehouse emits a hellfire-like glow that shines through Peter's bedroom window and into his eyes as they dart around the room, foreshadowing the evil that will soon possess his body. Straight from the opening shot -- in which Pogorzelski zooms his camera slowly in on a diorama of the Graham home that imperceptibly transforms into the actual bedroom of Peter -- Aster blurs the line separating the real world from the underworld, establishing his protagonists as nothing more than expendable pawns in the eyes of their greedy puppeteers.

Saxophonist and musician Colin Stetson composes a score that stalks Hereditary as though it were another character in the story. Ominous, slow, and droning, Stetson's music suffuses the first half of the movie with an oppressive, enveloping atmosphere of impending doom, keeping the audience on the edge of their seat long before the supernatural activity takes effect and priming them for the most dastardly outcome. Employing a combination of clarinets and brass, the music sounds like the growl of a demon salivating for the innocent blood of the Graham family, frequently played at a low volume like a taunting hum, complemented by the buzzing of flies in the attic. The production design of the Graham house amplifies the psychological isolation felt by the family who inhabits it. From the outside, it's both luxurious and forbidding, a wooden, isolated house surrounded by thin, towering trees, backdropped by a green expanse of forest in the backyard. The inside of the house is deceptively normal and cozy, but Aster perverts its hominess with peculiar details that subtly hint at the horror hiding in plain sight: mysterious names carved into Charlie's bedroom wall, a triangle drawn on the floor of Ellen's bedroom. Editors Jennifer Lame and Lucian Johnston apply a disorienting visual style to reflect the mindset of their characters: a match cut links a high-angle shot of Peter sitting on the edge of his bed in the dark with one of him sitting in his desk in a brightly lit classroom the next day, visually implying his lack of sleep; an exterior nighttime shot of the Graham house hard cuts to one in the daytime, or vice versa, in the apparent flip of a switch.

As compelling, sympathetic, and complex as the protagonists of Hereditary are, Aster gives short shrift to two of his supporting characters, both of whom had a right to play a more vital role in the proceedings following Charlie's untimely departure: Brendan and Bridget. Brendan is Peter's best friend, both teens united by their shared love of weed. Bridget is Peter's love interest who sits in front of him in history class. On the night of Charlie's death, both Brendan and Bridget are present at Aaron's house party. In fact, Bridget is in the same bedroom with Peter when Charlie comes in and complains about struggling to breathe. Therefore, she must have seen Peter pick up Charlie and rush her out of the house. Yet bizarrely enough, at no point after does she approach him in school. Does she even know that Charlie was killed en route to the hospital? If she does, she offers no condolences to Peter. If she doesn't, she doesn't even ask what happened after they left: "Is your sister okay?" "Did you get her to the hospital in time?" "What caused her to have an allergic reaction?" 

As for Brendan, the next time we see him, he and Peter are smoking weed under the bleachers with their friends at school as if nothing has changed. Maybe Brendan knows what happened, and this is his immature way of trying to help Peter move forward, by having fun and not talking about his grief? I don't know. It's weird. It feels as if Aster just forgets about them and awkwardly writes them out of the story when, realistically, they would be more involved in Peter's life than ever. 

Beyond the character shortchanging, Aster runs afoul of the logical pitfall of merging the supernatural horror of a demon with the man-made machinations of the humans conjuring him. According to Aster, Charlie's "accidental" death was actually orchestrated by the cult, who seek to free Paimon from Charlie's female body in exchange for the healthy male body of Peter. If that's the case, the human involvement aspect fails to hold water. How did the cultists foretell that Charlie would eat a slice of chocolate cake laced with walnuts? What direction Peter would be driving to the hospital to know which street to place a deer carcass? That Peter would swerve in the direction of the telephone pole? That Charlie would be sticking her head out the window? When placed under scrutiny, the machinations don't make sense. 

Fortunately, the execution -- from the emotionally eviscerating performances across the board to the palpable sense of loss, stomach-turning atmosphere of encroaching evil, unforgettably macabre imagery, and thrillingly go-for-broke ending -- is so flawless as to render concerns of real-world adherence irrelevant, while heralding the emergence of one of the boldest, most trailblazing, and uncompromising auteurs of modern horror. Hail, Ari!

8.4/10