Things start slowly but eerily. You get a somewhat weird adolescent daughter (a terrific, odd Milly Shapiro). You get a stressed-out Mom (Toni Collette, superb as usual). You get a well-meaning but somewhat ineffectual Dad (Gabriel Byrne, channeling Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People). And you get a really stressed out teen-aged son (Alex Wolff).
Around the 40-minute mark, something awful happens. Is it just random, horrible luck? Is the supernatural at work here or are we seeing a family whose members -- especially mother and son -- have serious, unresolved psychological issues?
Well, the next 80 minutes or so provide the answer to those and other questions. Hereditary does a nice job of eventually inverting our assumptions about who or what is responsible. It also has more beheadings than A Tale of Two Cities. Along with graveyard robbing, naked cult members leering from the shadows, mysterious lights, impotent authorities, ghostly drawings and writings, people burning alive, and so on, and so forth.
Told in an almost stately, deliberate manner, Hereditary nonetheless traffics in the stuff of Gothic nightmares as it draws to its tense conclusion. It may be too deliberate for some -- I found it exhilarating. I hope to see more from writer-director Ari Aster. He treats both the horror genre and the tropes he used with respect and diligence. Highly recommended.
