Best thing you'll see since Poltergeist: Hereditary

This was ace. Some flaws but really accomplished and not uneven. The fields of religious philosophy, mythology and spirituality are deep and for millennia scholars have devoted much serious, learned academic study to building their literatures; I refer to it all as mumbo-jumbo. So a film based on said 'jumbo has to work hard to win my favour, which this did.

I like the comparison to Poltergeist. I would enjoy on a number of levels seeing Gabriel Byrne doing “Before…after” abdominal thriusts; hopefully that’s a deleted scene. This is superior in that it isn’t Spielbergian in the slightest. It’ll hold up better.

Do want! Also, Toni Collette with a sexy white streak in her hair, a la Rogue.

One of my favorite little Byrne-isms is the scene when Annie’s trying to get him to do the seance. He’s reluctant to humor her, but begrudgingly goes along with it. When he sees the notes Annie got from Ann Dowd, he says, “What language is even that?”

That’s his line. “What language is even that?”

I don’t know if it’s the way the line was written, or a screw-up, or some Irish phrasing, but I loved hearing Gabriel Byrne say words in a weird order. “What language is even that?”

-Tom

FYI, this is on Amazon Prime now.

Finally got time to watch this. I heard all those “best horror in years” acclaim but it is kind of meh on the whole IMO. It went to The Witch’s school, left things ambiguous until the last 5-10 minutes and then went to town on the supernatural. For once can we have an ending that is REALLY ambiguous?

How about It Follows?

Oh yeah it was ambiguous and It Follows is goooooood start to finish.

How about The Witch? I don’t know that ambiguity is something I look for in movie endings. (I generally think it’s the result of lazy storytelling.) But I think there’s plenty of horror that has it.

Spoilers, naturally! I can’t imagine why anyone would be reading this thread if they haven’t already seen Heredity.

I’m actually surprised to hear you characterize it that way. Seems to me it’s very clear very early that something supernatural is going on. What’s unambiguous by the time it’s over, and maybe this is what you mean, is the nature of the supernatural. The ending of Heredity wallows gleefully in specificity, which I really liked. These weren’t some mysterious cultists with a shadowy agenda. This is exactly what they were doing, exactly for whom they were doing it, and exactly how they intended to do it. Rather than an ending with the ambiguity of “oh well, the good guys lost…”, it revealed that you’d been watching an origins story for how Paimon came into the world. A Paimon nativity play.

-Tom

I thought it was quite ambiguous until the end. The mother is difficult, secretive, manipulative. The family has a history of mental illness. Toni Collette sleepwalks (the scene where she fessed up in the support group is either lol or creepy. Probably both.) And you mean the devil incarnated has a nut allergy problem? Come on. There are earthly explanations, right until the end. The seance probably tipped the hand a little bit, even then the husband is pretty sceptical. Until he is on fire.

Which is basically The Witch’s way of storytelling. Everything CAN be earthly, until the end where everything tie together to be supernatural.

It is pretty much unambiguous at the end isn’t it? It is all supernatural rather than accidentally natural.

Is it? This is Plymouth. The first European settlement in the New World. Where did the members of that coven come from? There’s no one else out there. (EDIT: Obviously there are other people out there. But no Wampanoag or other natives appear in the film at all.) This is a movie about the characters’ religious imagination. All it does is take their perspective seriously and present nothing that contradicts it. I don’t know if “ambiguous” is the right word, but I don’t think it’s obvious how to interpret what happened in the film from outside that religious worldview.

Some of us are big, macabre weenies and enjoy reading about horror movies a lot more than we enjoy watching them.

Spoilers, of course!

These three shots are all in the first 30 minutes of Hereditary:

So either we’ve got 1) two unreliable narrators and a massive coincidence in that the symbol that’s been associated with twice with Annie’s mother happens to be carved into the phone pole that will decapitate Charlie, or 2) something supernatural. And, like I said, that’s just in the first 30 minutes.

Now I’ll grant you it’s not being overobvious. It’s certainly playing it close to the vest. But Hereditary is a classic example of the difference between subtle and ambiguous.

You wouldn’t know this on the first viewing, but that scene is also backstory for what Annie’s mother has been doing, and why she’s failed so far. First her son, Annie’s brother, killed himself before the ceremony could be conducted. And second, Annie cut off all contact when Peter was born. This is her third – posthumous! – attempt.

Get in there and pay your dues. If the rest of us are going to get freaked out, you have to take your turn!

-Tom

Me too. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for a slow burn, but I turned it off after about 30 mins and it just feels like it will be another hour before anything actually happens and I can’t bear to go back to it.

Wow, Tom, great images. Those are the kind of things that just pass over my head. This is why I like hearing astute people discuss movies - so I can find out about all the stuff I missed.

Wait so they hanged REAL witches in Salem? Come on, it was most likely that those women were not witches. Which is the assumption people generally go into a movie of that era: that creepy things happened, but people were behind them, not the supernatural, e.g. crazy women, rather than satanic women. Only at the end did Black Philip come in human guise and there is only one explanation.

In the first shot, one explanation is that it was a apparition. The alternative explanation is that Annie was hallucinating. In fact she did a double take and it was gone. The second one is again ambiguous. Only Charlie saw it. Annie, while grabbing Charlie and telling her off, never looked up, so it was never clear whether that was real. The third shot I didn’t see the symbol at all. I watched it on my laptop on my bed. And it won’t be clear until we see the symbol again in the attic near the end.

I think we both agree that there were hints planted throughout the movie. My take is that those hints can be read both ways, and I read them as psychological horror (i.e. Annie and Peter going nuts because of stress, mental trauma, and family history, and crazy cultists), until at the end when it finally showed its hands as supernatural horror.

PS: I’m ok with supernatural horror. And Toni Collette is great. I just don’t think Hereditary is the best horror I’ve seen in the last 5 years. It Follows definitely is the best I’ve seen recently. Sometimes horror doesn’t need explanation. It just is, and that made it even more horrifying.

This is actually my favorite method. Too many works of horror try for some kind of clockwork mythology, and while occasionally this can be fun (like in Phantasm), some of the most disturbing horror, in my opinion, presents something weird without trying to explain how it fits into the universe, expanding the realm of the unknown, etc. (Although the most disturbing horror I’ve ever not been able to finish, Dan Simmons’s Carrion Comfort, presents its “thing” as something all too similar to a real-life phenomenon.)

Wait, you think the dead grandmother was actually sitting out in the field surrounded by a ring of flames? Uh, how is that not supernatural? Dude, please.

As for the symbol, the camera pans to the symbol on the pole as Peter and Charlie drive past and then it abruptly stops and holds the frame with the symbol conspicuously centered in the frame. It holds for a moment to make sure you see it. It’s showing you something. That you’re watching on a laptop is immaterial to the fact that Ari Aster wants you to know, when Charlie is decapitated, that there was something going on with a magical symbol.

Look, I’m all for varying interpretations of ambiguity in movies. But I don’t understand why you want to ignore something the director is clearly trying to tell you. It’s fine that you missed that stuff; I certainly missed a lot of cool detail the first time I saw Hereditary. Like I said, it’s subtle. But it’s not – as you described – a movie that’s ambiguous about the supernatural elements until the end.

Do you have mundane explanations for the things that happen after the first thirty minutes? Is Peter now hallucinating? And is the successive and sudden instances of hallucinations in this family just a coincidence? Is Peter’s self-mutilation in the classroom just a clumsy accident? Is the Paimon light effect, seen at least twice, just an errant crystal conveniently dangling in a few windows somewhere? Are the seances hoaxes perpetrated by invisible pranksters? Does Charlie’s illustration book use some sort of self-drawing and automatic page turning technology heretofore unknown? These are all examples of Ari Aster establishing early and often that Hereditary is not a psychological horror movie, but a horror movie about something otherworldly manifesting itself in this family’s life.

-Tom

I actually can’t see if it was the dead granny. I just saw something burning in the middle of a field. Hello! Cultists! Fucking with this family since forever.

Which can be the cultists etching the symbol on the pole after the fact. Oooooo this pole allows the spirit to come out! Praise [insert evil name here]! Remember, it was a series of coincidence that lead to Charlie’s death. You can say evil spirit, but which evil spirit is weak enough to possess a child with nut allergy???

Yes yes yes yes and yes! This is a family with history of mental illness. The stress and the deaths lead to Annie, Charlie and Peter hallucinating and getting more and more bat shit crazy. The father is pretty sceptical until being set on fire spontaneously. That is pretty much the point when the movie finally showed its hands. Even then we have to wait for Peter to see the charred corpse to really know this is supernatural rather than Annie going crazy.

Granny being dug from the grave? Headless granny in attic? Of course those were cultist doings.

Oh, so now you’re contention is that someone put a grandma look-a-like out in the field to trick Charlie, but Annie just happened to not look up and see it? Did they rig a holographic projection of the grandmother for Annie earlier in the movie? I hope you did some stretching exercises before attempting those contortions.

After the fact? What are you even on about? The shot was before Charlie gets decapitated, as they’re on their way to the party. You’re really terrible at this, you know.

Look, there’s no shame in learning stuff about a movie by having discussions afterwards with someone who noticed things you missed. I can’t help you with whether or not you liked the movie – you’re on your own there – but I can help you understand stuff you didn’t notice, didn’t understand, or forgot. If that’s something that interests you, I’ll be here!

-Tom

I’ll take you up on it. The point where I kind of broke up with this movie was when she sets fire to the book the second time. The first time, she catches fire, so she has to put it out. She finally gets to the point where she realizes she has to sacrifice herself to save her son (it’s been a while, so forgive me if I’m mangling this), so she sets it on fire again… and Gabriel Byrne catches fire. What? Why did that happen?

it just sort of seemed like, “yeah, we set you up to expect one thing, but then we changed all the rules just to surprise you!” Up until then I was interested to see where it was going, but after that I just felt like anything could happen and there wasn’t going to be an explanation.