Movie Review: Hereditary (2018)
Hereditary on the surface works as a family drama turned horror movie. The movie approaches and traverses genres that were previously explored by films, like Insidious, in terms of drama, jump scares, tarot cards, familiar ouija boards, helpful mediums, spooked out kids, father in disbelief, an eerie younger sibling, a mystical revelation, and the list goes on and on. While all too familiar, maybe even predictable, the movie also wavers into unknown territories. Certain sequences of the movie try all too hard to hit a home run by building up sequences. For example, the pothead elder brother drives home his younger sister in a state of frenzy, letting her crash onto an electric post. Following this, the boy comes home, with no particular emotional response, just like how the scene had elicited a sigh from the viewer, and maybe like an afterthought of the screenwriter, the parents of the kids also come to identify the mishap very late. The movie chokes on loopholes that the actors desperately try to cover up. A dinner sequence of the family turns into a verbal spat between the mother and the son. At the end of it, the mother divulges her hatred toward the son, who led to this mishap. The son simultaneously retorts, saying that the mother forced his sister to the party; a distraught father sits down like a piece of bare wooden furniture. It is sequences like this, that bring out in full, the morbidity of the movie. Jump scares scenes leave potholes in the screenplay open that needs or beg another retelling of the story. The movie accepts its unnatural faith like the father of the family, who, in an encounter with the supernatural forces in the film, burns down like a piece of wooden furniture, by how he was already existing. In another pilot reveal, the elder brother, the only one who survived, levitates into the woodhouse accepting his role as a demon. In the same sequence, we find all the dead characters, from charred bodies to the self-mutilated mother, bowing in praise before the lone elder son, who is now an earthly embodiment of a suppressed hellish demon. There are so many subplots for the movie so much that it can be revealed episodically as Hereditary 1, Hereditary 2, Hereditary 3, Hereditary: the chaos. Despite being a brave attempt by a new director, who had shown much promise in his short movies, Hereditary lacked the finesse, narration, and the climax, that could have cemented it all.
