Hereditary is a subtle, patient, maybe a little too patient in retrospect, depiction of disability, motherhood, and grief. It saves its punches for the final few scenes. It lingers on the experience of ineffability, a lack of words, either through anger or youth or development. Some of its twists set it apart in terms of complexity of storytelling and misdirection, but the ending feels a little too much and too little (what one Slate writer described as throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks). I’ll avoid spoilers, because there are a lot of other corners of the internet that are interested in debriefing some of the headscratchers of this film with you.
(The great wait is almost over. Wife returns late tomorrow and then we can take a bite out of the films I’ve been asked to hold off on in her absence: Incredibles 2, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, American Animals, and Ocean’s 8. She did not ask me to hold off on Tag, so I went last night, and got through about 30 minutes of it before the lights kicked out and we were all sent packing. Felt a little bit like the guy at 711 who tells me no when I try to order the last three taquitos in the case at 2 in the morning, but if I get around to writing a quick take of the first 30 minutes of that film, I’ll let you know…. Below is going to be an aesthetic discussion of some of the general themes in the film and how they manifest themselves in other high quality horror films in recent years.)
The Power of Silence. It’s a theme that’s close to my heart and has some crossover with my research interest in the words left unsaid in drama and the ways in which we as readers can seek other means to recover those unspoken motives. I often return to modern comedies to explain what I think is going on, in shows like the American series The Office (2005-13), which uses silence a number of times to deal its deadliest emotional blows (tried to find a supercut of non-Jam/Pim silent scenes and couldn’t find one, so if there are any enterprising binge watchers out there…), or films like the 2009 adaptation of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which reclaims the primal scream as in the moments of childhood when vocabulary cannot accurately express complex emotion. This isn’t a phenomenon just reserved for good films either. Pixar’s insufferable The Good Dinosaur (2015) manufactured its gut-wrenching climax by hefting this limitation on themselves like a two ton weight.
Directors and screenwriters are experimenting with silence quite a bit these days: think WALL-E (2008) for domestic animation and Red Turtle (2016) for an international example. Don’t Breathe (2016) was a pulpy experiment for the horror genre, and John Krasinki’s A Quiet Place (2018) took the limit to its most distilled form. The Survivalist (2017, I have to bring up this film at least once a year to remind myself it was real, because I’ve yet to meet anyone outside of that theater who’ve ever heard of it), almost out of necessity, did this, because I think basically every man vs. nature or post-apocalyptic film requires long speechless scenes as an integral part of their genres.
Genre Expectations. Going into horror movies and “haunting” films specifically, I think there are a few films and filmmakers that have set the present-day standard (excepting the classics). I maintain that Personal Shopper (2015) is the film to beat. It was in my top five favorite films of that year and I think the less you know going in, the better. Actually, when I went, wife thought it was going to be mostly about personal shopping, which made it all the more entertaining to watch. It did a lot of interesting things with technology and skepticism and Kristen Stewart that I haven’t seen before, so if you haven’t seen that film yet, don’t read anything more about it, and set a day for yourself next week to watch it.
Get Out (2017) is still a little too fresh for me to know what to do with it. It crept out of nowhere, in what is usually the dumpster pile for aborted movies, February. It subverted all sorts of genre expectations in its structure, characterization, and audience. While most people were trying to get pumped for Matt Damon in The Great Wall or LEGO Batman, Jordan Peele was unloading this scathing satire of American liberalism on us. It’s fair to critique Hereditary in terms of its lack of certain forms of representation (It’s great to see Maura Tierney find work again, but is The Affair really going to go five seasons without a person of color in a lead role? Since when did white people suddenly have a monopoly on sexual infidelity?), but it’s doing at least a few things right in that department. It passes the Bechdel test with flying colors, and even without the three generations of women to shape our perception of the world within the movie, the film is intensely interested in the societal pressures heaped on women and girls. Not just the tension between the mother-son or husband-wife relationships, but the hidden pitfalls women fall into far from the male gaze: the shame and weirdness of inter-generational breastfeeding, sharing a bed with your brother and paint thinner, the gravity well of blame Anne can’t escape at the movies or at dinner.
Other trendsetters are people like Cary Fukunaga (Stephen King’s buzzy 2017 reboot of It) whose eye for crisp, hifi shots and his ambitious cinematography in True Detective kind of put him on the map for me and my older brother who follows these kinds of people more closely. They found a way to tap into the resurrected nostalgia for 80s settings and cinema with shows like Stranger Things, GLOW, The Americans, Twin Peaks, and It Follows. Hereditary wasn’t so much a creature of its own time and place. Not that it was a bland, featureless location (shark vs lady films have a long way to go), but setting doesn’t play the big role it does in other films of its ilk–thinking, the icy hills of Northern England in series four of Black Mirror or the creepy mansion in the… icy hills of Northern England in Guillermo del Toro’s maiden voyage into the English horror genre, Crimson Peaks (2015, wife adored). In fact, a lot of details about the setting and era feel secondary to the plot. Hereditary is sometimes (too) wrapped up in navel gazing: the shot where Anne’s asked to take pictures of her miniatures for the gallery show and she creates a miniature gallery and miniatures of her miniatures, or the two different English class lectures on the nature of agency in the tragic genre, first with Euripides’s Herakles and later about Agamemnon in Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. The lectures do one thing well, which is they subvert our expectations of what’s about to happen based on the trailers (and they’re pretty brave about burying stuff from the trailer late into the third act for us to uncover), but it doesn’t really forgive how useless they are in general, except for how not to teach and how to test the audience’s patience for faux-intellectual readings of classic lit.
(For examples of how to do classical allusions right: look no further than Moonlight‘s Chiron for thinking about hybridity and the tragic nature of forbidden desire. Christopher Nolan’s Inception, which I know people went through many stages of hype and disaffection, for all its blemishes, did a good job with the Ariadne myth, the labyrinth, and its self-awareness of story construction. Pan’s Labyrinth is probably the high water mark for me in terms of mythical allusions that serve as the contrast to the real world. It’s what makes del Toro one of the few and great magical realists working in film today. All of the Spanish horror films of his that I’ve seen [Pan’s Laybrinth, The Orphanage, Julia’s Eyes] flirt with a literary allusions.)
Speaking of Guilliermo del Toro. No discussion of modern standards for the genre would be complete without dipping into his venerable catalogue. The movie of his that seems most compatible with Hereditary‘s aesthetic is Guillermo’s twist on the Peter Pan/lost boy fairytale, The Orphanage (2007). If you haven’t seen The Orphanage’s seance scene, it’s worth a peek, because it’s different and well done. Both of those films are interested in portraying the seance scene in fresh, new ways that expand what we can do with this staple of ghost stories. I get the sense that Mama with Jessica Chastain (!) may have something to say about Hereditary, and if anyone’s seen it, let me know.
The last three companion films to Hereditary all come from 2014, strangely enough: the Austrian Goodnight Mommy, Woody Allen’s (monster in his own right) Magic in the Moonlight (staring Emma Stone and King George the too old for her), and indie darling It Follows. Goodnight Mommy was actually the first film I thought of when I saw the trailer for this movie, since the trailer and GM both revel in the untethering of characters from sanity, and they’re both, obviously, about mothers who have fraught relationships with their children. The pacing of Hereditary makes GM look like it’s flying at two hundred miles an hour, but if you enjoyed the concept, you’ll like GM.
I only mention Allen’s Magic in the Moonlight because so much of that film had practical effects inspired by and about spiritualism. So, if you’re willing to stomach a pretty icky pairing of Emma Stone and Colin Firth trying to pretend to be attracted to one another, you may like this period film about skepticism and belief, even as we’re increasingly skeptical about anyone who believes Woody Allen enough to work for him.
Last of the bunch, It Follows. Simple concept, a little racy, and an extremely versatile metaphor for teenage sexuality, slut-shaming, STDs, and sexual abuse. Hereditary, by comparison, is a little muddled about what it wants to say. I’m not saying that I wanted a simpler metaphor. I don’t mind the messiness. I like stewing as much as the next guy. But there’s just… a lot in the third act with little foreshadowing, interpretation, or mystery. The visuals are fine, nothing special, but the final few scenes erode the versatility of the metaphors the film has cast out for our viewing pleasure. What I Look for When I’m Looking at Horror Films is first and foremost a flexible metaphor, and compared to It Follows, Hereditary is undisciplined in its ability to return to and build upon its own conceit. Miniature, mental illness, sexuality, disability, the guilt of motherhood, Tully-esque self-reliance, grief. The themes are messy and disjointed, and maybe that’s on purpose. Maybe the screenplay can’t decide what it’s about because it thinks horror films should be about more in general, but it’s hard for me to get behind this particular manifestation of that critique.
Characterization. I thought the film’s depiction of Charlie is complex, which I think is a bit of a controversial statement, but I’m prepared to have my mind changed. Charlie’s disability isn’t alluded to directly at all and it’s not a prop. Her tongue noises aren’t played for scares (mostly). She sits in a classroom with a mixed class of students with apparent developmental differences. No one calls her bad names. One of older girls calls her work “retarded,” but no one at a medium sized high school party ever really comments on the fact that Charlie’s there at all. Anne asks Charlie if she’s a “idiot” when she goes outside without shoes or a coat. Her father’s lecture about pneumonia is met with a bit of an awkward non-response response from Charlie, which I think is meant to signal something about her to us. Steve actually comes off as a little overbearing to me in the first five minutes, demanding people sleep in their own beds, that they take off their shoes in their own house (why does he have to tell a thirteen year old that?), his question about peanuts in a mysteriously acquired chocolate bar, chiding Charlie for sleeping in the tree house. Makes for a weird contrast when his character plays the straight man to all of the pandemonium in the later acts. The Twist at the Party is an interesting turn in terms of storytelling, which I think put into perspective what the film’s true focus is on, but that’s for another place and time.
Extra Credit Reading. Slate has an article that puts Hereditary into a thematic grouping with other Teenage Girls as Monsters films in recent memory. It got my attention because it brought up Thoroughbreds, a personal favorite from this year, along with Raw and The Lure, both very fine international films in their own right (Raw is one of the few films that I’ve gone back to almost immediately for more). I haven’t thought about The Lure in months and it’s pretty niche (if Polish semi-musical horror isn’t niche I don’t know what is). Even Julia’s Body gets a shout out: “Hell is a teenage girl.”
Hereditary fits pretty squarely into that category of films, along with The Shape of Water, Patti Cake$ (2017), Girl Asleep (2015, even though wife and friend were meh on this I’m gonna stand by it, because it’s the right thing to do) and, actually, I might put First Reformed in this group as well, that are worth seeing because of how different they are from everything else out right now and everything else of their caliber. Sometimes novelty substitutes for finish. There are worse out there, like Tag, for instance.
PS. First time I’d seen the trailer for (dynamic duo from Interstellar!) Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey’s Serenity this fall. Nada Abouarrage for W Magazine has done God’s work in compiling all of Anne’s hairstyle choices from the past two decades, and determined that she was last blonde in 2013.
PPS. Also, for those following the drama of Moviepass’s generous self-immolation (none of this would be possible without you Moviepass, riding off the cliff with me in your passenger seat), it appears they have been gifted an infusion of kindling by someone who likes watching the world burn, which means we’re in business at least through June, despite predictions to the contrary.
PPPS. I recognize that the animated masterpiece, Rock Dog, came out in February 2017 alongside Get Out, which is why I feel like we all need to rethink our expectations for February films.
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