the_zookeeper

I just read a review of this movie by user "Madzima," in which he or she claims possible stupidity for missing the brilliance of "Hereditary."

My answer to Madzima is this: you might not necessarily be stupid, but you did miss what so many others caught, and no, you cannot blame your missing the emotional, graphic terror on the director, the actors, or anyone other than yourself.

"Hereditary" is about the destruction of a family following the death of the matriarch's mother. It was sold as being seen through the eyes of the mother, Toni Collette, but this is bait-and-switch advertising, for the real heart-rending story in this movie is not about Mom, but about her son, played by Alex Wolff.

I don't want to give away too much in this review. (Really, though, you can Google other reviews and find out what happens.) My goal is to tell you about the movie's tone and worth and--after reading how much Madzima hated it--to prepare you for how you should approach it.

You should watch this movie not as a horror film at first at all. No. Don't do that. But do watch it in a dark room. Turn off all the lights. Unplug the phones. Turn off your cell. Turn up the volume. Then, as the characters unfold in front of you, pretend they are your friends, your neighbors... pretend they are your family. If you are a mom, love the kids. If you are a young adult, consider this is a weird family and go with it: don't be an uptight douche. If you are a father, husband, then try to ask yourself how attached or involved you are with your family.

THIS is where the movie hits people. HERE. It's the connections that "regular" people should have to their familial members. You should love your mom. Your mom should love you. Your dad should be involved with your life. You should feel safe in your own home.

If you watch closely, early on, you might ask yourself where the warmth is in this family. If you don't see the loss of such, then... no, you might not get the movie. It's this disintegration of warmth between all the members -- save for Charlie and her brother -- that hit me early on, and I came from a kind-of dysfunctional family myself.... but we were not... this.

If you miss this point, then, no, you will miss the disintegration. It's important, too, because this loss of bonds is the real horror. A woman's standing outside the area at your school, where you eat lunch, and screaming that you are expelled without context, but no one else seems to hear her? Whatever. Within the context of the movie? Terrifying. Isolating. Beyond reality. THIS is what the movie brings to the table. It brings a slow burn, a spiraling into madness that take time.

The real terror of this movie is familial. It's watching a mother abandon one child in favor of a dead one. It's watching a child realize he's going to die. It's watching a father give up because he never was alive to begin with. But most importantly, it's considering the title... Hereditary. It's considering that no matter what someone does, he or she is simply bound to repeat the past. No choice. No escape. When metered with demonic supernatural, it's an unbeatable concept.

And if it all passed you by, Jesus. I feel badly for you. You missed some absolutely graphic horror.

I was rather excited to see this movie, because some of the reviews here were positive and the back of the CD case interested me. Part of it read as follows: "As they are each picked off one by one by a bizarre beast it becomes clear that none of them will make it out of the forest alive; unless the one the monster so desires is left behind." I should have taken a cue from this. If the back of the case isn't even written properly (sentence fragments should not follow a semi colon), then the chances that the movie might not be worth watching are higher than average.

The plot revolves around four friends who, while on some sort of road trip, blow a tire and plunge into the surrounding forest. When the one male in the group steps outside to see what the damage is, he is attacked by something and ends up with a possibly life-threatening injury.

After this incident the group becomes separated and the movie's title subject comes into play. Throughout the movie, it's clear that someone put a great deal of thought into the different scenes, situations, and dialog, but that person failed to put it together cohesively.

The scenes are fragmented, and the characters act in a way that would simply not be logical in the situation, were it to really occur. The female lead knows that her male friend is seriously injured, and yet she walks around calmly for much of the time afterward.

There are also small items that lower the movie's attempted believability. (For example, when human beings, who are endothermic, reach for jackets due to the temperature of the woods, it is not possible for a rattlesnake, an exothermic animal, to be active. It would be too sluggish to move.) Even considering all the little mistakes in filming and poorly-developed characters (with the exception of Spike, who is something else), I still might have enjoyed the movie had it not been for the music. The music was just terrible. It was not appropriate for many of the scenes and even went so far as to ruin the mood much of the time. I began to wonder if the director had driven to the nearest church to find an organ player, and the one he found had suffered from a stroke years earlier and was half tuned on Balwinnie at the time.

The concept of the movie was interesting, and the creature's costume was well-designed. But this wasn't enough to save the entire film from a horrible music score and unbelievable dialog and character behavior (not to mention obviously staged reviews). And seemingly endothermic snakes.