Does Toni Collette have a sixth sense about supernatural movies securing success at the box office? So it seems with her latest foray into fright sight and scary sounds, HEREDITARY.
Here she plays the heir loon of a family tinged by tragedy and harbouring unhinged behaviours. Especially the females. Mother and daughter are crystalline creepy while dad and son seem sane in comparison.
The film commences with an obituary and funeral notice for the mother of Collette’s character, Annie. Annie is a model maker, specialising in intricately detailed doll houses and one of the conceits of HEREDITARY is that it is framed in parallel existence, the real house and the doll house existing simultaneously, reality and unreality mixing it up with subtext and symbolism.
After the funeral, Annie gives an unerringly honest and unsettling eulogy. Returning home there is a palpable pall that has descended on the house. But is it just the usual grief and stress of bereavement, or something unsettlingly unusual.
Another family tragedy follows in quick succession, a horror so horrendous, horrible and heinous and real, that some audiences may query the story’s careening off into hocus pocus.
To his credit, writer director Ari Aster’s convoluted narrative colludes to keep the pace compulsive and cinematography and production design values are never less than compelling.
There’s scintillating cinematography from Pawel Pogorzelski, simmering then seething with sinister. Production designer Grace Yun drapes the sets with a neo Gothic vibe.
Performances are top notch, with Collette’s personality pendulum calibrated precisely to swing unsettlingly from maternal to infernal.
Thematically kindred to Rosemary’s Baby, HEREDITARY has all the hallmarks of the horror genre – satanic cults, archaic prophesy, arcane symbols, cemeteries, seances, sacrifice, apparitions, attics and avian suicide.
Not as good as Get Out, but vastly superior to Mother!, HEREDITARY is certainly an attention seeker that deserves attention.
