The New-Old Haunts of Hereditary
Jun. 11th, 2018 09:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glitter_n_goreDon't watch this with your family.
Alternatively: Do, but beware that it might be cathartic, or profoundly triggering, depending on what your relationship with your family is like. Either way, this movie will stick to your brain for days.
Also, I think writer/director Ari Aster might share my bizarrely specific fear of open car windows.
The line between "homage" and "derivative" is entirely dependent on the skill of the artist wielding the tools. As is the line between "newcomer" and "dedicated genre scholar who did some serious legwork to debut with something this good." This director knows what he's doing, and it's apparent in his rigid story structure that both adheres to a lot of classic horror tropes, and subverts them at the same time.
To neatly summarize, this is a story about bad things happening to one particular family because of cult shenanigans. That could apply to a dozen other films in the horror lexicon, with varying degrees of quality. So why does this one work so well? How does this movie manage to reinvent the wheel, while still keeping it easily recognizable as a wheel? As usual, everything comes down to character. Toni Collette as Annie, and Alex Wolff as her teenage son, Peter, own the knockout performances here, often holding the focus entirely through subtly shifting facial expressions, or sinking their teeth into sharp dialogue full of all the things you think but should never say out loud. But that's not all this movie has going for it.
The first thing I noticed is the veneer of unreality permeating every frame. Annie builds miniatures, and the first shot blends from the "real" house, to a highly detailed doll-size version of the house, and back again, before the audience can get their bearings. From that point onward, there's no security as to whether you're watching something real, something fabricated, or something that doesn't exist outside the characters' minds. Are those sweeping wide shots of an actual city, or a finely crafted scale model? Is this gruesome accident happening in real time, or is it another dream sequence? Even scene transitions are unnerving. Aster takes a view of the house and surrounding woods and snaps from night to day in the blink of an eye, like a light switch clicking on.
Then there's the way individual scenes are shot. It's all slow pan-around reveals and long static shots. I was reminded of the way the American version of The Ring used jump scare reveals, but in reverse. When Aster wants to show you something grisly, he doesn't flash it on the screen with a scare chord and then pull it away before you can fully process what you're seeing. No, he wants you to take it all in, and he wants it to linger. One sequence in particular travels across at least four different scenes slowly stitched together, giving you time to see the other characters react to it, and then finally filling the screen with the thing they've been witnessing while ragged screams tear through the soundtrack. A similarly subversive technique is when something awful has been tucked into a shadowy corner the whole time, and you wait so long for the ax to fall that you start to wonder if anyone else in the theater can see it hanging there.
"Unsettling" doesn't begin to cover it. Just thinking about this movie to review it is making me uncomfortable. And what's brilliant about the way Aster approaches horror is that he knows just showing the audience something objectively creepy isn't enough. As I've said before, horror is an emotional genre, and this movie is overflowing with guilt, sorrow, rage, and pain. There are cult shenanigans at work here, and plenty of violence. But at its heart, this is a story about a family tearing itself apart with demons of its own making. A seance in a dark, candlelit room isn't nearly as viscerally upsetting as a shouting match erupting at the dinner table. The real tension lives in the push-pull between blame and grief that so many of us can relate to.
What stings most is the fact that, despite the mounting anxiety picking at everyone's nerves, they all clearly still love each other. This isn't a situation like You're Next where these guys were itching for an excuse to go for each other's throats. Or, to use a much nerdier example, the Thor movies where you know from the get-go where Thor and Loki's mutually destructive sibling rivalry comes from. This feels like a more authentic type of dysfunction. You can't pinpoint where, when, or why things went wrong for this family. Only that it's been bad, and getting worse, for a very long time, while each of them turns to increasingly questionable methods to cope.
So many of our faults, and strengths, are hereditary. Whether you intend to or not, you absorb a lot of idiosyncrasies from your family, often things you don't even realize you're doing until someone else points it out. That's the magic trick Aster pulled off with this movie. You can write off things like ghosts, demons, magic, and spiritualism if you want to. But the knowledge that the ones you love most are also the most capable of harming you, simply because they know you better than anyone else? That's real. And that's scary.
Alternatively: Do, but beware that it might be cathartic, or profoundly triggering, depending on what your relationship with your family is like. Either way, this movie will stick to your brain for days.
Also, I think writer/director Ari Aster might share my bizarrely specific fear of open car windows.
The line between "homage" and "derivative" is entirely dependent on the skill of the artist wielding the tools. As is the line between "newcomer" and "dedicated genre scholar who did some serious legwork to debut with something this good." This director knows what he's doing, and it's apparent in his rigid story structure that both adheres to a lot of classic horror tropes, and subverts them at the same time.
To neatly summarize, this is a story about bad things happening to one particular family because of cult shenanigans. That could apply to a dozen other films in the horror lexicon, with varying degrees of quality. So why does this one work so well? How does this movie manage to reinvent the wheel, while still keeping it easily recognizable as a wheel? As usual, everything comes down to character. Toni Collette as Annie, and Alex Wolff as her teenage son, Peter, own the knockout performances here, often holding the focus entirely through subtly shifting facial expressions, or sinking their teeth into sharp dialogue full of all the things you think but should never say out loud. But that's not all this movie has going for it.
The first thing I noticed is the veneer of unreality permeating every frame. Annie builds miniatures, and the first shot blends from the "real" house, to a highly detailed doll-size version of the house, and back again, before the audience can get their bearings. From that point onward, there's no security as to whether you're watching something real, something fabricated, or something that doesn't exist outside the characters' minds. Are those sweeping wide shots of an actual city, or a finely crafted scale model? Is this gruesome accident happening in real time, or is it another dream sequence? Even scene transitions are unnerving. Aster takes a view of the house and surrounding woods and snaps from night to day in the blink of an eye, like a light switch clicking on.
Then there's the way individual scenes are shot. It's all slow pan-around reveals and long static shots. I was reminded of the way the American version of The Ring used jump scare reveals, but in reverse. When Aster wants to show you something grisly, he doesn't flash it on the screen with a scare chord and then pull it away before you can fully process what you're seeing. No, he wants you to take it all in, and he wants it to linger. One sequence in particular travels across at least four different scenes slowly stitched together, giving you time to see the other characters react to it, and then finally filling the screen with the thing they've been witnessing while ragged screams tear through the soundtrack. A similarly subversive technique is when something awful has been tucked into a shadowy corner the whole time, and you wait so long for the ax to fall that you start to wonder if anyone else in the theater can see it hanging there.
"Unsettling" doesn't begin to cover it. Just thinking about this movie to review it is making me uncomfortable. And what's brilliant about the way Aster approaches horror is that he knows just showing the audience something objectively creepy isn't enough. As I've said before, horror is an emotional genre, and this movie is overflowing with guilt, sorrow, rage, and pain. There are cult shenanigans at work here, and plenty of violence. But at its heart, this is a story about a family tearing itself apart with demons of its own making. A seance in a dark, candlelit room isn't nearly as viscerally upsetting as a shouting match erupting at the dinner table. The real tension lives in the push-pull between blame and grief that so many of us can relate to.
What stings most is the fact that, despite the mounting anxiety picking at everyone's nerves, they all clearly still love each other. This isn't a situation like You're Next where these guys were itching for an excuse to go for each other's throats. Or, to use a much nerdier example, the Thor movies where you know from the get-go where Thor and Loki's mutually destructive sibling rivalry comes from. This feels like a more authentic type of dysfunction. You can't pinpoint where, when, or why things went wrong for this family. Only that it's been bad, and getting worse, for a very long time, while each of them turns to increasingly questionable methods to cope.
So many of our faults, and strengths, are hereditary. Whether you intend to or not, you absorb a lot of idiosyncrasies from your family, often things you don't even realize you're doing until someone else points it out. That's the magic trick Aster pulled off with this movie. You can write off things like ghosts, demons, magic, and spiritualism if you want to. But the knowledge that the ones you love most are also the most capable of harming you, simply because they know you better than anyone else? That's real. And that's scary.