Hereditary review: A provocative and subtle horror film

Ari Aster, 127 mins, starring: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Mallory Bechtel, Zachary Arthur

Midway through writer-director Ari Aster’s supernatural horror film, one of the main characters pinches himself in a desperate bid to wake up. Peter (Alex Wolff) is a pot smoking teenager from a troubled family. He is in a strung out and emotional state.

Poor Peter can’t work out whether he is hallucinating that he is seeing his dead and decapitated relatives – or whether he is being haunted for real. The film induces a similar feeling of queasy uncertainty in viewers.

Hereditary arrives in British cinemas already being touted after its Sundance premiere as the scariest, most bloodcurdling horror picture of the year. – The Exorcist of its era. It only partially lives up to the poster billing. Perhaps, at a midnight screening, the shock factor would have been more intense.

At a press preview on a sunny, summer morning, though, the film rarely gives you the sense that a chilly blast from Doomsday is blowing through your bones. Its real strength is less in making your hair turn white in apoplectic shock than in the ingenuity of its storytelling and its insights into why even close-knit families crumble.

Director Aster doesn’t just know his horror movies. He clearly has a grounding in Greek tragedy too. At school, at least when he is paying attention, Peter is studying Sophocles. As one of his classmates notes, the protagonists in Sophocles’ plays are “pawns in a horrible, hopeless machine”.

That, of course, is exactly what Peter and his family are too. The sense that their fates are predetermined is reinforced by the film’s frequent references to dollhouses. Peter’s mother, Annie (Toni Collette), is an artist who works with miniatures, tiny sculptures of humans boxed in oppressive little rooms. She and her family are just as helpless as these miniature figurines when the evil ones come calling.

The film begins with an obituary notice, for Annie’s 78-year-old mother, Ellen Leigh. In pictures, she looks like a sweet old lady but Annie’s funeral address is strangely ambivalent. “My mother was a very secretive and private woman,” Annie tells a congregation full of unfamiliar faces.

Not only was Ellen secretive but she was stubborn too. (“If ever she was mistaken, well, that was your opinion and you were wrong.”) Sorting through her stuff, Annie comes across books on spiritualism and hints about her mom’s hidden life.

Only gradually does Aster reveal quite how dysfunctional this family really is. We learn that Annie’s schizophrenic brother committed suicide, blaming their mother for his tormented state of mind. Now, Annie’s own children are showing disturbing signs.

Her daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) was the grandmother’s favourite and has taken the death badly. She is the type of weird child who’ll cut off a dead bird’s head with a pair of scissors. It doesn’t help that she has a nut allergy. Annie is losing her grasp on sanity. Annie’s even-tempered husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is becoming increasingly concerned at her behaviour.

One of the strengths of Hereditary is the way it bottles up its supernatural elements. Early on, the film unfolds as an intense psychological drama about a family trying to process grief and guilt.

The light relief comes from Peter, a typical high school slacker type whose attention will always be more on the backside of the girl sitting in front of him than on his textbook. It takes a long time for the seances to begin and for the film to veer off into Dennis Wheatley and Rosemary’s Baby-style territory.

Eventually, Aster throws in some very gruesome Grand Guignol-like scenes. We see characters garrotting themselves and being set alight. Ants come crawling out of the window sill. Arguably the most shocking moment of the film is when one character becomes possessed and starts banging his own face on a desk, smashing himself into a pulp.

For once, the site of death and maximum creepiness isn’t down in the basement. It’s an attic with a pull-down ladder.

Toni Collette was in The Sixth Sense and is presumably used to supernatural shenanigans. Her nuanced and very intense performance anchors the film and gives it an emotional impact it wouldn’t have otherwise. She is the tragic heroine of the story, desperately trying to keep the family together.

She’ll rail furiously against Peter one moment (“I can’t accept and I can’t forgive because nobody admits what they’ve done,” she yells at him) and then try to smother him in love and affection the next. When she attends a self-help group for the bereaved, her revelations about her family background are startling even by comparison with what other grief-stricken families have endured.

Aster’s screenplay tells his story from several points of view. Perspectives shift all the time. A family member who appears sympathetic in one scene will seem very sinister the next when seen through somebody else’s eyes. The film blurs the lines between what is real and what the characters are imagining.

There are moments in which the camera glides through the Grahams’ home. The slowness of its movement combines with the eerie, understated music from composer Colin Stetson to create a very unsettling ambience.

The creepiest performance comes from Ann Dowd as the seemingly sympathetic stranger, Joanie, who befriends Annie. Dowd is one of those character actors you recognise from other films and TV dramas without immediately being able to place her. Here, she has a toughness and meanness you can always detect in spite of her seeming kindness

Hereditary may not be as terrifying as the advance hype has suggested but it’s a provocative and subtle horror film with layers you don’t find in more conventional haunted house tales. The fright factor here comes less from the shrieks, decapitations and simmering undercurrent of violence than from the grief and doubt that we read in Collette’s features and in the eyes of her disbelieving son.

Hereditary hits UK cinemas 15 June.