Hereditary

When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter's family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited. Making his feature debut, writer-director Ari Aster unleashes a nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown that exhibits the craft and precision of a nascent auteur, transforming a familial tragedy into something ominous and deeply disquieting, and pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain with its shattering portrait of heritage gone to hell.

Review from rogerebert.com

Creepy beyond belief, “Hereditary” is one of those movies you shouldn’t describe in detail, because if you do, it will not only ruin surprises but make the listener wonder if you saw the film or dreamed it. The movie sustains a throb of dread throughout its first 90 minutes, and its final 30 are off-the-rails in the best way. Writer/director Ari Aster structures the tale so that it’s hard to be sure if the uncanny events you’re seeing are real or figments of the imaginations of the Graham family, a clan cursed both by Biblical bad luck and a genetic disposition towards various types of mental illness.

Toni Collette stars as Annie Graham, an artist and mother who’s coping with the death of her mother while trying to finish an exhibition of dioramas that appear to depict her own family’s life and Annie’s internal state. Alex Wolff is Annie’s oldest child, Peter, a sad-eyed pothead drifting through life. Milly Shapiro plays Charlie, Peter’s younger sister, a disturbed 13-year-old with the dead stare of a statue. Gabriel Byrne plays Annie’s stoic, kindhearted husband Steve, who just wants the family to be happy and struggles to make peace. All are reeling from the death of the family matriarch, who we learn was anything but cuddly. The family is uncomfortable with frank displays of emotion, and with anything that might reveal their interiors to one another. Annie tells her husband that she’s going off to the movies when she’s really attending a grief management circle that meets in a church basement. Peter anesthetizes himself with marijuana. Charlie draws obsessively in a small notebook, and …

Well, maybe I shouldn’t tell you about the things I was just about to tell you about. Maybe it’s better if you just experience the story on your own. The deeper that “Hereditary” pulled me in, the more grateful I was that I didn’t know much about it before setting foot in the theater—including what relationship, if any, the plot has to the movie’s one word title.

Read the rest of the review from Matt Zoller Seitz here...