'Hereditary'- Ari Aster's debut film, opens up with a tragic event - a death of a loved one. This being just one of the myriad of misfortunes the characters have to face in the film. The pacing is slow in the beginning and till the third act the story has an unclear direction. The lack of jump scares is substituted with long eerie shots, unsettling details and imagery. However, the slow pacing is not necessarily the film's weak point as it lures us into the characters' stories and builds our interest in them.
The characters presented on the screen could be compared to the typical archetypes presented in a broken household: the two family members who cannot properly connect due to the generation gap or past conflict, a person trying to desperately keep the family together, the perpetrator of deeply rooted trauma. The exploration of those difficulties does not solely apply to the given situation the characters have to deal with in the film. Instead, many can relate to once exhibiting the traits of those archetypes, as family difficulties are prevalent. Possibly for this reason many viewers were disappointed in the film, as the trailer failed to fully grasp the essence of the story and marketed it as your typical jump-scare-crazy-people-terrifying-demons type of scary movie. Whereas, this film is more than that.
Supernatural elements are guaranteed to be shown but the director's primary focus was to demonstrate how families deal with loss and trauma. Personally, getting to know the characters so well and the dynamic of their relationship with each other made me truly terrified by the third act when the intense demon shenanigans were happening. Moreover, the type of fright one gets from this film also comes from the realism of the events in the first two acts. However, it is not fully the unfortunate events that scare you but the psychological magnitude they have on the characters affected by them.
The brilliance of the film also comes in the composition of the shots, showing small details in the corners of the screen, not fully understood at first glance, but hinting at their relevance later on in the story.
Overall, even if you are a fan of classical horror genre films I still recommend this film, as it's hybrid of genres is original and innovative.
