Review #176: Hereditary (2018)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #31: Hereditary (2018)

Man. Where to even start with this movie? It's fantastic. It might be the scariest horror movie I've seen in the last ten years, definitely in the top five of all time. But it's not just scary- every facet of this film has clearly had so much work put into it, and it's like every single element that went into making it was the perfect tool for the job. Roles are perfectly cast, visual motifs are the exact right degree of unsettling, certain shots linger for the perfect amount of time to let the gravity of what you've just seen sink in, and so on. I don't know what could be done to make this movie better without simultaneously making it worse.

I think Hereditary is an amazing deconstruction of trauma and grief. Not only do we see how the characters all cope with the grief that comes from the loss of a loved one throughout the whole film, but certain scenes (one in particular comes to mind) shows a shockingly believable moment of absolute horror and the trauma of coming to terms with an accident that went wrong in the worst possible way. Even the big moments aside, the lingering effects of this trauma- like when Peter is sitting in class and he momentarily sees the rear-view mirror in his peripheral vision and he tries his hardest not to look at it- are just so viscerally terrifying on a level any viewer can understand.

Because obviously, this movie deals with a lot of non-normal things, like cults, demons, supernatural stuff. But every step of the way, the characters act so real, so true to life, that you yourself feel the exact type of pain and sorrow and fear that they're going through, so much more than if this was just a slasher where some nightmare monster is chasing the protagonists around a summer camp. We all feel the pain and sorrow and fear that these characters feel, because we know that if a few things were different, we could be in their shoes, and that's terrifying.

But all that lofty stuff is just scratching the surface of what makes Hereditary a masterpiece of horror. The tension ramps up so well, there's so many things to catch your eye and really make you wonder, and at the end of the day, there's so much to make you want to go back and re-watch it. There are details you might have missed, and bits of information that will be recontextualized on a future viewing. When I reviewed A Quiet Place, I mentioned that the story and setting were good but made less sense the more you thought about them- Hereditary is almost the opposite, where the more you think about it, the more details you notice, the more nuanced and interwoven and cleverly written it is! It starts good, and just keeps getting better!

Hereditary is fantastic. There's really no other way to put it. If you like scary movies, or even if you don't like scary movies but you like good cinema, then it's a must-see.

Overall Ratings: 10/10 Cult Members Hiding In Plain Sight

Strange Thing In Retrospect: After watching this movie, have you ever gone back and watched the trailer? It's so bizarre. It tells you nothing cohesive about the film, despite seemingly trying to twist scenes and lines from the actual film into something it totally isn't. Like, the "who's gonna take care of me after you die?" line is played as something sinister, which is so weird, because there's so much sinister stuff in this film that could have been used instead. Also like 75% of the trailer is shots of Charlie, despite all of that footage being from the first thirty minutes of the film. It's just bizarre.