Who'd have thought things would actually get quite busy for me during the final months of my university degree, and while I would have loved to work on my blog, my final assessments had to take precedent, as per. On the bright side, this is officially the last time I can ever use this excuse because, as of May, I have officially finished my degree in Film and Television Production! Hurrah! While I've been studying for the past three years, the blog has been lying nearly dormant so now I've got a bit more free time on my hands, I'm hoping to give it a bit of a revival. I can't promise regular posts, but certainly more frequent than they have been.
So, with Ari Aster's new horror film Midsommar releasing this week, now seems like a very appropriate time to look back on his debut from last year. Maybe, one could argue, more appropriate than if I were to have just randomly reviewed it out of the blue in the middle of spring. So, ultimately, I see this three-month delay as a deliberate rescheduling in the name of theming that I totally had planned from the get-go. Yes, that's the official story and I'll hear no more questions on the matter.
Now, before we get stuck in (but, you know, after my signature long waffly intro), I need to make a quick PSA. Normally, I try to keep spoilers in my posts to an absolute minimum, but for me to even begin to discuss this film to any major degree, I'm basically going to have to spoil everything. So, this entire post is basically going to be non-stop spoilers. For all of its flaws, Hereditary is still very much worth a watch and I highly recommend it, but to experience its full impact you need to know as little about the film as possible going in. Therefore, if you have not seen this film yet, PLEASE stop reading, go give it a watch (it's on Amazon Prime at the moment) and then return here. This is your point of no return.
SPOILERS AHEAD
We all good? Everyone seen it? Ok, let's get to work.
Hereditary could have been, and for the most part was shaping up to be, one of the greatest, most powerful and even dare-I-say revolutionary horror films of the decade, and even a new personal favourite of mine. The film falls down however upon reaching its ending. And by fall down, I mean it trips over the last hurdle so hard that it smashes its face on the ground and shatters its teeth beyond the recovery of even the most skilled of dentists. What I'm trying to say is, it sucks.
It's not impossible for a film to recover from a bad ending, though. Some films like 10 Cloverfield Lane and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are fantastic throughout and then soil themselves in their final ten minutes. However, both of these films still work because there's enough closure before the fuck-up that you could theoretically just switch the film off at the right moment and be satisfied, and merely omit the real ending. The problem with Hereditary and the reason it frustrates me so much is that it does not have such closure.
The best way to really explain what's wrong with it is to pretty much start at the beginning and just explain my way through the film and my reaction to it. Hence the spoilers. So, with that in mind...
The film starts off with some familiar generic horror tropes: we've got a recently deceased grandma who liked to have control over the family, there's a creepy little outcast daughter who's obsessed with the macabre, there's a stressed mother who's hobby is crafting dioramas, including of her own house and family, and just overall there's a vague foreboding sense that some supernatural shit will eventually go down, presumably in an Exorcist kinda direction. So far, so standard. Until...
About thirty minutes into the film, out of absolutely nowhere, the girl gets brutally decapitated in a car crash. And, I have to say, the presentation of this moment was masterfully horrifying. The impact is barely on screen: just flash cuts, a sickening crunch and then quiet. The camera lingers on the driver for what feels like an eternity, the back seat of the car cropped from view as he stares in empty horror. He comes home, he lies on his bed, the same expression on his face, still we are denied the information. Deep down, we know what's happened, but waiting for the confirmation is torture. Then, from out of shot, the mother screams, discovering the girl. We still don't get to see. The shot lingers on the boy just long enough before, finally, we see the head.
It's shocking, it's unexpected, and the build-up to the reveal is deliciously uncomfortable. The generic, supernatural horror plot crashes to a screeching halt and is replaced by genuine, real-world human horror. It's nothing less than an emotional sucker punch that left me feeling completely drained, with a dark pit in my stomach, like no other horror film had ever made me feel before. Hereditary took all the overdone, supernatural jump-scare-ridden bollocks that is currently choking the genre in titles like The Nun and Annabelle and threw it back in our faces, instead turning its dark mirror towards the cruel and unforgiving nature of reality and the seemingly insignificant choices we make and the unpredictable accidents that spiral out from them through the relentless Rube-Goldberg machine of life.
The fears of boogeymen, ghostly occurrences and bumps in the night are all very well, but there's still a certain distance with which we regard them, as however frightened we might get we know it can never really happen to us in real life. The beauty of Hereditary comes from its ability to craft just as scary and unpleasant a horror out of tangible, real-life tragedy that any one of us can and probably even will experience at some point in our lives, confronting us with the idea that we or our loved ones can be taken in an instant, without reason and without mercy, and what's even worse is we can be unknowingly responsible for it.
And so the film continues, now focusing on the grieving family as they try to cope with the aftermath of their actions. The mother and brother suffer from their intolerable guilt as they try to pass the blame between them, while the father does his best to hold the family together. This culminates in a dinner scene that may be one of the most uncomfortable scenes in all of cinema as the mother and brother viciously argue, topped with a truly gut-wrenching monologue from the mother. Did I mention, the mother is played by Toni Collette? Did I also mention that she deserves a fucking Oscar, for this scene alone, let alone the entire movie?
It was at about this point that I was ready to crown this as my film of the year. One of the most harrowing cinema experiences I'd ever had, not only was the apparent concept of this film so strong and so unlike anything I'd really seen in the horror genre up until that point, but its execution was mesmerising, emanating an oppressive atmosphere of dread that seemed to completely smother me on an emotional level.
I remember the excitement I felt in the cinema as I considered all of this, that thrill you feel when you know you've found something really special. I remember thinking about composing this very review, what I would say, how I would say it, and genuinely got excited by the prospect of telling the world how great this film was. I repeatedly thought to myself 'they just have to get the ending right'...
The warning signs started to appear when the supernatural shit started to creep back into the picture. The mother starts looking into séance and has a couple of mild supernatural experiences, nothing above magic-show level. She even tries to get her family involved, but the father and brother try to convince her that it's all in her head.
I actually don't mind this section at all, as it still nicely fits the theme of grief and refusing to move past death, and especially with the denying of the other family members, the supernatural results can be chalked up to the mother's deteriorating mental state. 'Great,' I thought, 'another point in the film's favour. I wonder how they're going to end it.'
'I really had you for a minute there,' the film seems to crow. 'You thought I'd ceremoniously chucked out all the overused generic horror bullshit in exchange for a more unique and powerful story, didn't you? Let's see what I've got here....oh look! It's overused generic horror bullshit!'
The dead grandma, after basically not being mentioned for about ninety minutes, is back all of a sudden with powers from beyond the grave. Out of the blue, corpses float and possessed family members crawl up the walls like spiders, chasing after the brother.
A cult of headless corpses show up, apparently worshipping the girl's severed head as some kind of new queen of the underworld. And then the film just kinda ends, in a sticky clusterfuck of seen-before horror imagery.
I was in shock. I don't think I've ever seen a film subvert it's genre expectations only to unironically revert them at the end, certainly not to this extent. The chilling, genuine horror of loss had been undermined by spoopy ghosts and some ancient mystical evil, so utterly divorced from the reality that the rest of the film's horror seemed to be placed in.
Now, before I get any angry backlash about how I missed something and have completely misinterpreted the film, I am already pretty certain that I have. I'm sure this film is too good and too smart to misjudge an ending that badly. I'm sure when I give this film a rewatch I'll notice things I didn't before and more of it will fall into place and maybe the ending might make more sense.
In the meantime, this post exists as my initial reaction, how I saw things on the first viewing and from that stance, I was disappointed. What worries me most is if this film really is supposed to be about possession and supernatural meddling all the way through, then that leaves us with an accidentally fantastic horror film stuck within a much less interesting one, and frankly, I don't really know what to make of that.
If that is the case, that does at least leave the criticism that the supernatural element takes way too much of a backseat during the second act. Maybe the horror film I thought I saw and loved never really existed there in the first place: a subjective analysis that picked up on and ignored elements I wasn't supposed to.
Ultimately, I guess that's kinda the beauty of cinema, that different audiences can have such wildly different experiences with a film and find their own meanings within the work, even if they weren't necessarily supposed to be there. Intentional or not, this film certainly had some effect on me, and quite a strong one at that, so does that really make this interpretation any less valid?
END SPOILERS
At the end of the day, Hereditary has some truly outstanding sequences of horror, however intentional they may have been, and Aster and his crew demonstrate a wealth of talent and potential. Even if this didn't entirely come together, it's still one hell of a debut and blows most other horror films out of the water.
Midsommar already seems to be receiving a lot of praise, even so early into its cinema run, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing it this weekend. While I try my best not to get too hyped before going to see any film, I'd be lying if I said I don't expect Midsommar to be one of the standout films of the year. We just have to hope that Aster can stick the landing.
Hereditary - 2018 - Ari Aster - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: High
