Hereditary Review

Hereditary review.

It’s been five years since Ari Aster’s Hereditary was unleashed on the world. A look back at the scene that elevated the movie to legendary status.

Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.

Hereditary

Directed by Ari Aster

Written by Ari Aster

Starring Toni Collette, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne and Alex Wolff

Hereditary Review

One of the many great things about horror is how many different reactions it can elicit in a viewer.  Fear is the most obvious…but horror has a lot more than one trick up its sleeve.  It can make us laugh and cry.  Horror can make you nervous and it can make you feel ill.  Feeling anxious or shocked are common experiences when watching horror movies.  Hereditary made me feel something new.  Specifically, the most famous sequence of the film.  More specifically, the scene that followed it.  As we look back at Ari Aster’s breakthrough film on its fifth anniversary…that scene, and the feeling it provided, is what I want to focus on in this review.

The most shocking moment in Hereditary happens early on.  13-year-old Charlie (Milly Shapiro) has an allergic reaction and sticks her head out of the backseat window, gasping for air as her brother Peter (Alex Wolff) speeds her to the hospital.  When he swerves to avoid an animal in the road…Charlie is decapitated by a telephone pole.  If you’ve ever had a conversation about Hereditary…there is no doubt this was what you talked about.  It’s a shocking moment.  There is plenty more horror imagery to come in the picture…but this moment is the one that never leaves you.

That being said…it’s the few minutes following the decapitation that elevate the sequence from shocker to legendary.  I’ve felt all the feelings listed above at one point or another.  Many of them during Hereditary.  But I’ve never felt anything like I did in the aftermath of Charlie’s death. 

Peter is in shock…his eyes welling up with tears.  He never looks behind him.  It would only confirm what he already knows.  It would make it real.  After an excruciating few seconds that feel like an eternity…Peter slowly pulls the car back onto the road and drives away.  He quietly parks in front of his house and walks to his room.  He doesn’t tell anyone what happened.  Doesn’t say a word.  That’s when the feeling hits the hardest.  I just felt so…empty. 

Last year’s Scare Value Best Picture The Innocents had moments like this.  Though, I’d argue, none that hit as hard.  Peter lies in bed waiting for it to become real.  When we hear his mother (Toni Collette) leave the house the next morning…we know that it’s about to.  She discovers Charlie’s headless body in the car.  We don’t watch her do it.  We stay with Peter.  It’s a lot worse.

I’ve often tried to think of what I’d do in Peter’s situation.  It’s impossible to know for sure.  He’s in complete shock.  It’s easy to say you’d have called someone or woken up your parents…but you can’t know.  Watching the scenes play out with a pit in your stomach isn’t the same as experiencing a shocking tragedy like Peter has.  One of the reasons the empty feeling hits so hard is that there are no good answers.  There’s no good anything.

A few scenes later Peter’s mother lets us off the hook a bit.  She must…the movie won’t work if we can’t move past that feeling.  It comes in an angry outburst at Peter…but it serves a different purpose.  We need her to say what she says.  That she knows it was an accident.  She knows we’re in pain.  That she wishes she could take it away.  What follows is more pointed and angrier…but those are the words we all needed to hear to move on with the story.

The story moves on to find new dark places and shocking moments.  Toni Collette is a force of nature in Hereditary.  There is so much true horror on display that you can’t possibly be prepared for what comes next.  Because Hereditary proved that it would go there.  Everything is on the table if they decapitate a child and then make us feel like we were responsible. 

It’s been five years since Ari Aster unleashed Hereditary on the world.  Five years of living with that feeling in the pit of your stomach.  Or, at least, the memory of it.  The movie reinforced the incredible talent of its star and announced the arrival of Aster as a genre force to be followed.  While Hereditary has plenty of other moments worth examination…it’s the unshakable ones after its biggest shock that I’m still thinking about, and feeling, five years later. It’s what we’ve all inherited from Hereditary.

Scare Value

There’s a lot more to Hereditary than just the scene we discussed here. It’s one of the best horror films in modern times. Toni Collette’s performance is Oscar worthy. The climax is one of the wildest things you’ll ever see. There are a lot of things that make Hereditary a great movie. But there is one sequence that makes it a classic. A gut-wrenching sequence the likes of which film rarely, if ever, has matched. A sequence worth losing your head over.

4.5/5

Hereditary Links

Streaming on Max

Rent/Buy on VOD from Vudu and Amazon

Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon

Hereditary Trailer

If you enjoyed this review of Hereditary, check out another classic movie review: The Purge