When the notorious and royal film company A24 announced a film called Hereditary, advertised that it was 
from the makers of The Witch and made every film critic start using words like “this generation’s Exorcist,” it naturally caught my attention.
Hereditary is a film that, as half of Twitter’s population argued for most of the summer, transcends horror tradition. Going far beyond tropes and motifs that have long since outstayed their welcome (jump-scares, CGI, too elaborate backstories), Hereditary feels like yet another name in the “horror films of the future” roster. This is no real surprise from A24, who usually produce these films, but this movie, in many ways, is atypical even for them.
True to its name, Hereditary centers on a family directly after the death of the grandmother. This particular grandmother, Ellen, was not your average granny and left behind a disturbing, traumatic legacy of mental illness and dark secrets. Her daughter Annie (Toni Collette) has to keep her own family in check after this, managing tensions between her angsty son, Peter (Alex Wolff), and her eerily behaving daughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro).
One of many reasons that some audiences found this movie to be out of place with other horror films is that the cinematography is slow, wide and carefully oriented at almost every frame of the movie, bearing kinship to Stanley Kubrick films like The Shining. This technique makes for some gorgeous visual moments and equally terrifying ones, the latter of which is strong in the veins of this movie. The visual orientation and expert use of darkness make for the kind of eerie moments you would imagine happening in your house at night.
I won’t go into details, but within the first 30 minutes of this film, it was already home to some of the most shocking moments of any film I’ve seen. By deviating so relentlessly from standard horror plotlines, the viewer is always guessing at what absolutely unpredictable thing will happen next, and, by the end of it, enough shocking moments have transpired to fill waking and sleeping terrors.
But, I find myself asking if it deviates a little too much. The last thing I want is a horror film like all the other ones Hollywood cranks out with a meatgrinder, but Hereditary also strays from viewer expectations in ways that are much less flattering. Much of its plot relies on certain ambiguities and parallels that make subliminal and symbolic sense, but are completely unbalancing when it comes to the on-paper plotline.
The plot goes in directions that, though potentially valid in the underlying meanings of the film, simply don’t match with other elements of the plot. This creates a very disorienting experience, and not in the way I like.
For every ounce of my love that flows into this movie, an almost equal supply of hatred follows. I love this movie enough to passionately despise it when it jeopardizes its strengths with its leeching, unnecessary, intolerable weaknesses.
When all is said and done, though, Hereditary will always have a place in my heart and on my shelf as one of the most interesting and shocking films of the 2010s. Viewers who are sick of the drivel of mainstream horror and patient with the oddities of experimental horror likely will feel the same.
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