Hereditary (2018)

It’s classified as horror, but that classification feels a little narrow once you’ve seen it. Hereditary is about family secrets, loss, guilt, and a force that cannot be controlled. Horror is the medium through which that story is told — not the purpose itself. My rating is ★4.0. It is extraordinarily hard to believe this is Ari Aster’s debut feature.

What it’s about — a family collapsing after the grandmother’s death

After the grandmother’s death, strange things begin to happen to the Graham family. Mother Annie (Toni Collette) starts to come apart mentally, and son Peter (Alex Wolff) sinks into trauma following a catastrophic accident. Something seems to have entered the family with the grandmother’s passing. The film drops a shocking event early on, then slowly and deliberately tightens the tension from that point forward.

Direction — building dread without jump scares

Ari Aster does not manufacture horror through jump scares. Instead, he calculates precisely where the camera should dwell, making the audience anxious before they’ve consciously registered what they’re afraid of. The technique of moving between miniature sets and real environments blurs the boundary between reality and unreality. Scenes that build dread through silence alone — no music — are particularly effective.

Performance — Toni Collette in the dinner-table monologue

Toni Collette’s performance is the film’s beating heart. It is cited as one of the great horror acting turns so widely that it’s hard to overstate — and her not receiving an Academy Award nomination continues to be discussed. She portrays the intermingling of grief, guilt, and madness in a single person with suffocating precision. In particular, the monologue at the dinner table is something that stays with you for a long time. Alex Wolff also carries his crumbling young man entirely through his body.

What the film says — inherited trauma and curse

The title “Hereditary” carries simultaneous biological and cultural meanings. The film’s subject is that what we inherit from family is not only physical appearance and temperament, but also secrets, trauma, and curses. Strip away the supernatural horror and you find a story about mental suffering passed down within families.

Ratings & reception

IMDb score is 7.3. Rotten Tomatoes freshness is 90%, exceptionally high. Ari Aster’s debut set a new standard for the horror genre upon release, with particular praise directed at Toni Collette’s performance as among the finest in any horror film. Opinion is divided on the supernatural turns of the ending.

What doesn’t work

Its method of accumulating tension over more than two hours requires patience. The finale may feel overly cult-inflected or excessive to some viewers. Fully understanding the film requires later research into the symbols and mythology it embeds. There is also a slight feeling of discontinuity between the first and second halves — the first half functions superbly as a family psychological drama, while the second pivots to foregrounding the supernatural, redirecting the psychological tension built earlier. How satisfied you are with the film depends heavily on which direction you were hoping it would take. Because the film leans so heavily on Toni Collette’s performance, viewers for whom that register doesn’t connect may find two hours very long.

Verdict

One of the most impressive horror films of the last decade. It works not just as horror but as family drama and psychological thriller in their own right. Worth watching for Toni Collette’s performance alone. This is a film you can recommend even to people who dislike horror — the fear here is not ghosts but the dread of pain passed down through families and the anxiety of fate beyond control. That is a fundamentally more primal and more enduring kind of fear. Aster’s follow-up Midsommar works the genre similarly, but many feel this debut has a sharper edge. If there is a list of contemporary horror films you must see at least once, this film belongs on it.

Recommended for

• Viewers wanting psychological horror and supernatural horror together
• Fans interested in Toni Collette’s extreme performance work
• Those who prefer slowly accumulating dread over quick scares