Hereditary - Review

Hereditary

In 1998 Australian actress Toni Collette played an earnest loving mother in the most talked about horror film of that year called “The Sixth Sense”. Now fast forward 20 years later and one again she has delved into the mysteries of spiritual life and death with her latest effort called “Hereditary”. A physiological thriller about a family going through emotional crisis while dealing with the sudden death of a matriarchal relative that seems to have had a far more profound impact on their emotional well-being well beyond expected grieving. And as the story layers are peeled away we see the entire family beginning to unravel in a cryptic and terrifying way as the secrets of their ancestry is revealed to all. Going forward what they discover is the more they try to outrun their sinister fate the more they succumb to the evil  they seem to have inherited.

REVIEW: Rotten Tomato gave this film a 94 rating which by all accounts is universally very high. So with that in mind I was hoping largely from the trailers to find something imaginative and yet horrifying at the same time, even though I am not one who is easily manipulated with freight in horror films. They tend to make me laugh more than be frighten. But putting my personal quirk aside I found “Hereditary” less a horror flick or to put in simpler terms more a 2 hour film that tried earnestly to delve into upheaval impact of what mourning does to families already in turmoil. But leaving the theater I cannot even say it even did that very well as I found myself more baffled to what either the message or the plot were actually all about.

Basically I found the film a poorly directed and a poorly constructed story.  And while I am certain both the writer and director were heavily influenced by the previous films “The Wicker Man” and “The Shinning”, their "Hereditary" film managed only to confused me more each passing frame to its less than shocking finale.

To compound matters even more there were several scenes that seemed were intentionally crafted as directorial techniques that were only intrusively designed to shock audiences which from my perspective did not add anything substantive to the story itself. Instead (for me) they only managed to befuddle me as to what was the purpose of the scene in the first place. For example seeing people sitting on the ceiling for no reason or effective purpose. Someone floating without a head to a tree house glowing in the color red but not red once the camera moves inside. Someone spontaneously bursting into flames. Repetitive “clocking” sounds that had no reasonable explanation or understandable meaning. And finally the brief instruction of a  very strange and sinister looking adolescent little girl who apparently was inflicted with a birth defect but who only added more to the story’s overall confusion with her make up that for my money made me feel I was looking at a miniature version of NBA great Larry Bird with a bad natty wig. You can only imagine at this point I was mumbling a lot  ………….”WTF”.

“Hereditary”…………..I cannot say the film was boring. I also cannot say it didn’t have some entertainment value. But overall from my viewing experience it’s as if someone put me in a car blind folded and 2 hours later I take the scarf off to find me and the car on the deck of a freighter in the middle of some early ocean with God only knowing how I got there and where was I going next.

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2.00 Stars