Hereditary
(2018)Every family tree hides a secret.
The spirit of a recently deceased matriarch haunts her surviving family in filmmaker Ari Aster's debut, starring the great Toni Collette.... More
"The Graham family starts to unravel following the death of their reclusive grandmother. Even after she’s gone, the matriarch still casts a dark shadow over the family, especially her loner teenage granddaughter, Charlie, whom she always had an unusual fascination with. As an overwhelming terror takes over their household, their peaceful existence is ripped apart, forcing their mother to explore a darker realm in order to escape the unfortunate fate they've inherited." (Sundance Film Festival)Hide
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Directed by Ari Aster (feature debut)
Starring Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Zachary Arthur, Mallory Bechtel, Brock McKinney
Written by Ari Aster
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Hereditary
BY Barny lister
Grief sucks. I didn't need to waste 2 hours with this annoying family to be reminded of that. A few excellent sequences but it didn't have the strong rich atmosphere that It Follows had, nor did it freak me out the way those last 15 minutes of The Witch did. Come to think of it....I should have never given Solo 5 stars either.
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The Press Reviews
Hereditary takes the core haunting element of a spirit with a malevolent agenda and runs with it in a seemingly endless series of unexpected directions over two breathless hours of escalating terror that never slackens for a minute. Full Review
First-time feature filmmaker Ari Aster works from familiar building blocks, but the film's emotional sophistication and Toni Collette's gutsy performance keep the proceedings feeling fresh and electric. Full Review
A harrowing story of unthinkable family tragedy that veers into the realm of the supernatural, Hereditary takes its place as a new generation's The Exorcist - for some, it will spin heads even more savagely. Full Review
Collette's performance is staggering. She plays Annie as a woman who begins to wear her buried rage and guilt on the outside. Full Review
Hereditary is a terrifically unsettling look at the howling despair of grief, combined with that good, old-fashioned fear of what demons we may have inherited from our parents. Full Review
...an easy film to recommend to adventurous genre lovers. Full Review
When you pare away its demonic accoutrements, you're left with the most intractably nightmarish arena of all: hearth and home. Full Review
It's not this generation's Exorcist, but it's still a lot of frightening fun. Full Review
The paradox of Hereditary is that a film seemingly cut off from everyday experience nonetheless pushes buttons very close to home. Full Review
Hereditary is less about escaping renegade spirits than the utter futility in trying to escape ancestry: your DNA; your blood; your genetic makeup; yourself. Full Review
BY Aaron Yap Flicks Writer
It’s not often you’ll see an American horror movie so willing to methodically process the aftermath of personal tragedy. Hereditary does that, and then some. Hereditary just stays in the hurt. The suffocating stench of flower bouquets at a funeral. The deafening silence of returning to your home after a loved one has passed. The family unit threatening to implode from repressed guilt. This is grief as a festering, gangrenous wound. And how can it not be? Writer/director Ari Aster, in his staggeringly confident feature debut, stuns us with an unbelievably traumatic on-screen death that no one — not its characters, nor us — can quite recover from. The ensuing two hours is like Polanski on uppers: one long, paralyzing, highly unsettling psycho-drama, suffused with awful, exhausting dread, and disrupted by discombobulating detours into the occult.... More
There’s not a weak link in the cast. Toni Collette is phenomenal as the desperately grieving mother, her skillfully sustained display of unchecked hysteria refusing to let the viewer off the hook. Alex Wolff impresses too as her withdrawn teenage son who finds himself on the receiving end of some fairly punishing situations. More unassuming but no less present, Gabriel Byrne’s stoic-under-pressure dad provides a little stability to the escalating mayhem that slowly begins to envelope them. Hereditary stumbles slightly with some unnecessary, last-minute exposition, but it’s nothing that’ll undo the sheer terror already established by Aster’s bold, artfully crafted nightmare imagery and Colin Stetson’s tremulous, anxiety-ridden score. This one’s genuinely gut-wrenching — pack some diapers.Hide
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