Nice! That will help fill the void for a week when German and US movie releases don’t sync up.
I finally saw this. Pretty unnerving in spots, but I do wish companies like Blumhouse and A24 would stop with the “scariest movie ever” marketing schtick. They keep writing checks that their movies can’t possibly cash.
On the one hand, I’m excited - on the other: poor Dingus, I think this will be rough for him
Corrections: David Robert Mitchell directed The Myth of the American Sleepover before It Follows, and Trey Edward Shults directed Krisha before It Comes At Night.
Anyway, I just came back from watching this, and dug it a lot. It gets graceless in its plotting, especially towards the back half, but I can forgive that because it also gave me the moment with…uh, a common roadside object after which I had no clue where the fuck it was going. It’s so all over place, its emotions are so major key, while being played completely straight, but also there’s an undercurrent of black humour.
It’s the most Korean American movie I’ve seen.
Actually, here’s a triple bill for you:
Kill List
The Wailing
Hereditary
I haven’t seen them so they don’t count. My other excuse is, well, really those are student films.
I was going to ask you to explain this, but in the course of clicking reply and starting to type, I realized, whoa, yeah, that’s one hell of a triple feature. Perfect order of showing, too, from worst to best. Nicely done, Hoglund.
-Tom
Sad family subtext, its about how we all grieve and inherit shit and uhm …invert Jewish/Christian symbology?. cmon guys, its a passable movie, but they really hyped this up too much. 6/10 or 2 stars or above average. This is like when people said Mother! would FUCK YOU UP! meh.
NEWSFLASH! Not really scary! A little boring, interesting buildup near last third, but I already saw Rosemary’s Baby.
Yes Toni Colette is an awesome actress, but she was better in The Sixth Sense.
My opinion of it is improving the farther I get away from it and the more I think about it. It’s definitely the recent movie I’m most excited about seeing again when it’s out on streaming.
So if you haven’t seen Hereditary by this point, you probably should bail on this thread, as it’s going to be conversations among people who have seen it.
I’ve seen it three times and even noticed a couple of new things the third time. But the second time was especially nice because you can watch with an eye for the clues Ari Aster is scattering throughout the movie.
For instance, the girl in the classroom expounding on tragedy being more tragic when the signs are, like, literally all around them and, like, they literally can’t see them. Also, Annie’s testimonial at the support group has a lot of backstory you can’t possibly appreciate on a first viewing. Watching Ann Dowd is even more of a delight the second time around. I made a big to-do about the Poltergeist comparisons, but one thing I can’t get out of my head watching Ann Dowd is Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby. Ann Dowd’s Joan isn’t as wacky, of course, but when you watch those performances after knowing what’s going to happen, you can appreciate all the more what the actresses are bringing to bear.
The way Joan “invokes” Annie’s monologue about her relationship with her son is an example. That “what about your relationship with your son?” line comes at such a weird but carefully calculated moment. I wonder, too, if the implication is that Joan has drugged Annie to make her susceptible to suggestion? There’s no other way I can read that one shot of Annie pulling some weird seed or herb from her tongue after she drinks the tea. Why else would Aster show us that? That also explains Joan’s frown when Annie pulls out a bottle of pills. Is she wondering how the pills will interact with the drugged tea? And consider this comes after* Annie hasn’t responded to the flyer about the seance brought to her home. It’s like this is Joan’s more direct Plan B getting underway. Watching Ann Dowd with that in mind is a real treat.
I really need to check out Handmaid’s Tale.
-Tom
* Actually, I might be wrong about the timing. The “seed in the tea” scene is during Annie’s first conversation with Joan.
Was listening to a podcast where they said Rian Johnson hinted at his reasons for making Luke a ‘failure’ was because he wanted to go with the general direction of Han being a ‘failure’ in TFA and that it represented the guilt of a generation of babyboomer parents, that they might have done more psychic damage while in there pursuit of self knowledge and wealth endeavours… what that has to do with Star Wars is beyond me… but It is interesting how ALOT of commentary on movies like Hereditary (maybe based on just the title as well) has lead to all these theories of ‘why’ and what it represents just like TLJ. The movie itself seems to struck hard nerves, like a neverending grief that is stuck in anger mode (the kubler ross grief thing). Abortion seems to be a central theme to Hereditary. Plus whats with the title… the movie is interesting to dissect…hmm maybe its more 8/10 or 4/5 or pretty good?!?
TLJ still sucks though.
Also I think the director of Hereditary must have played The Sims… the dollhouse motif kept reminding me of The Sims!
I went to see this with a friend, who’s into horror movies, yesterday. He didn’t like it at all, expressing surprise to me today that it got such good reviews.
As for me, I thought it was okay at best. I can see what the movie was trying to achieve and why many people liked it, but for me it just didn’t manage to tap into that creepy dread like, say, Paranormal Activity did. I think it was mostly the pacing and focus that felt off to me.
I’m curious as to why you say this, as I thought the last 10 minutes really deflated all the tension that had been building until then. It was just playing out what we knew was going to happen, and it wasn’t inherently terrifying. I mean, he seems to be basically a genie, but from hell. It probably didn’t help that I saw this film the day after watching Rosemary’s Baby, so maybe I was burned out on “Hail X” scenes by that point.
I’m glad you brought this up, Ginger_Yellow, because it seems to be a sticking point for a lot of folks, which is fair.
But first of all, the quoted bit you’re responding to was specifically about revealing information. What I wrote was:
What I’m singling out there is how much information he presents in the end. Which is all of it. Everything. He lays all his cards on the table, and he even shifts to a new point of view with a new tone just so we know exactly what he has done. Where he has brought us. There are no question marks or mystery left, which is quite an accomplishment given everything leading up to it. Not only will all your questions be answered, but you’ll see through the eyes of the winner. What a weird choice, and Ari Aster runs with it unapologetically.
You knew what was going to happen? You’re a lot smarter than me! I didn’t know that Toni Colette would get tricked into burning her husband alive, her daughter would saw off her own mother’s head as if she was another dead bird, that their bodies would be flown about as if they were dolls, that naked cultists would emerge from the woods, that a full size marionette had been constructed in the tree house, and that evil would completely prevail. I certainly didn’t know that none of them ever had any free agency, at any point in the movie, and that I was watching a message about predestination, but flipped on its head from the perspective of evil.
Hmm, now I’m thinking about its connections to The Omen, which didn’t really occur to me before.
As for whether it’s scary, I just don’t understand the “it wasn’t scary” complaints about horror movies. There are plenty of horror movies that tap into dread or uncertainty or even vague unease instead of direct fear. I guess it’s like how some comedies aren’t funny to some people. But I never feel that I need a horror movie to “scare” me. That said, the ending of Hereditary definitely scared me. You’re made of sterner stuff than I.
But regardless of whether it’s scary to you, the key to the ending is that you’ve gotten invested in the characters. In most horror movies, I’m not affected by gore like Annie’s jerky movements and squirting blood effects as her head gets sawed off. That’s usually just a money shot, and that sort of stuff is often more funny than disturbing. Gore is so cheap.
But when gore like that happens to a character you care about? Annie is such an emotionally complex character, and her relationships with her daughter, son, and husband are so vividly developed, and her anguish is so keenly presented and channeled by Toni Colette. So whether it was scary or not, that attic scene is utterly horrific. This is how the movie is going to treat someone we care about?
In terms of the ending overall, as I mentioned in the write-up, the movie for me is a modern day revision of Poltergeist. Back then, the family prevails and is stronger. In this movie, the demon wins and the family fails, having been manipulated all along. As per the first discussion about tragedy, what happens to all of them is all the more horrific because there was never anything they could have done. What’s most meaningful about the finale, regardless of whether it scared you, is how mercilessly Aster follows through on his premise.
It’s been 50 years since Rosemary’s Baby. I think it’s safe to riff on the ending without the risk of being cliched. :)
By the way, I’m assuming Ari Aster is too young to be doing this intentionally, but the ending is right out of the ending of a weird 70s horror movie called Burnt Offerings. Here it is queued up to the relevant moment:
-Tom
Well, I meant from after the big reveal, and specifically after the book burning, um, backfired. Obviously I didn’t anticipate all the details of the action, but it was clear it was going to end up with Peter becoming the embodiment of Paemon and the rest was just, emotionally, for me, filler. I wasn’t invested in Annie at that stage because she wasn’t Annie any more, she was a wall-running, head-banging meat puppet. I ceased being invested in Annie when the change came over her after the book burning. Even Peter by that point, given that the film had made it perfectly obvious it was he wasn’t going to be saved.I’d have been much happier with the film if it had ended at the very point the change came over Annie. The rest was basically redundant for me.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I felt watching that shot.
By the way, I didn’t mean to suggest the ceremony was cliched, merely that the impact may have been reduced by the circumstances I watched it in, which inevitably led me to draw comparisons with one of the all-time great horror movies.
Man, you really were done with the movie at that point! But that makes your complaints even weirder to me. When a character dies in a movie, I don’t instantly stop caring about them. But, yeah, if you don’t care about what happens to the characters, I can understand why the ending didn’t work for you.
-Tom
I care for the character after she dies (which for me was the change immediately after the book-burning), but only for her life before that point*. The meat puppet wasn’t Annie, it was her body. I don’t care for the deadites in Evil Dead, even if I care for who they were before.
- and for what she means to the other characters, but there’s only one left at that point and not for long.
I’m not sure why you’re equating Toni Colette’s character to throwaway teen fodder in a horror comedy, but if that’s how you felt, that’s how you felt. And Peter was still alive up until the final three minutes or so, but you already said you didn’t care what happened to him once you figured out he wasn’t going to live. It sounds like all the character development and performances really didn’t work for you if you just instantly tuned out like that.
I’m pretty sure all that was intentional on the director’s part, and with more than just Rosemary’s Baby! The difference is that I actually liked what I was watching, so I liked how it was a variation on stuff like Poltergeist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and even goofy stuff like Burnt Offerings. I generally like it when good directors homage other good directors. I suppose one man’s homage is another man’s derivative.
-Tom
I’m not. I’m equating what happened to her after the book burning scene to it, because I had a similar emotional response to the decapitation scene, for similar reasons, that I have to deadites getting decapitated. I don’t think “Oh my God it’s awful what’s happening to Toni Colette’s character”, because it’s not Toni Colette’s character. Annie left a while ago.
For Peter, it wasn’t quite at the same point that I totally stopped caring about what was going to happen to him, but I will say the tension I had been feeling until then was considerably reduced after the desk scene, and completely gone once he’d jumped out the window.
All this isn’t to say I thought the ending ruined the movie (which I did otherwise like!), in the way that Gerald’s Game was ruined by its ending. Just that it really didn’t land for me.
Edit: Not derivative, just lesser.
Ha ha, you saw Gerald’s Game.
-Tom
So D+ cinemascore… it’s easy to brush it off saying that moviegoers are stupid and stuff, but you shouldn’t reduce the stats to a single factor.
I deeply loved this movie till the very end, it was creepy, very effective and mind boggling, but the ending sequence ruined it for me. I rewatched it several times to get why. I think It’s sloppily shot and edited, therefore, in its current form it allows ambiguity and duality of interpretation.
What I mean by that, if the movie doesn’t work for you (and there is a very high chance it won’t work for you because it switches the protagonist), it stops being scary. On the opposite, it starts looking incredibly, stupidly silly since the moment the son gets to the attic.
Ginger_Yellow already explained why the attic decapitation scene didn’t quite work, and the later scenes didn’t quite work either. Naked people looked silly, the director revealed way too much, especially if you compare it with the previous appearance. More over, one of them was moving her hand, which ruined the creepiness factor even more. The boy’s scream was badly acted, it was way too short and not terrifying at all. The jump through the window had inappropriate tone, it was way too fast and concealing, cartoonish enough, almost taken from a dark comedy. Flying headless body was just plain bad practical effect which wasn’t necessary. Naked people in the wood were not necessary as well. Everything inside the tree house was good enough, but the final exposition speech completely ruined the scene, leaving a very bad taste in my mouth.
Ari Aster knew when to imply things and when to reveal them till the final 10 minutes, when he completely lost it ruining his own masterpiece.
P.S: I’m from Russia, they’re dubbing movies here and often changing their names to make them more marketable. Well, they were smart enough to rename it ‘Reincarnation’ here, spoiling the whole thing from the get-go. So watching the first support group scene I pretty much figured why the little girl looked and behave so weird. Although it made everything more predictable, it didn’t ruin the movie for me, the final 10 minutes did.
P.P.S: regarding all this zeitgeisty stuff, I don’t care, here is why:
I haven’t cheered that hard for a horror movie since It Follows! I don’t watch a ton of horror, but to my naive eyes it seems like Hereditary had a great sense of creating tension and misdirection by playing off the moods of the genre. I appreciate the understated approach there, with lots of tension and not much release into overt fright, like It Follows or Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
But when it does go for payoff, damn does it go all out. I haven’t seen that much beheading since I binged Game of Thrones in a month. The consistency of theme is a nice touch too.
Loved that bit Tom mentions about the Herakles scene being full of foreshadowing. Will definitely have to revisit this sometime.