Generational curse

Family demons and film mastery are in the DNA of ‘Hereditary’

When a horror film has you reflexively making the sign of the cross, that means it’s doing its job.

In the tradition of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Exorcist,” “Hereditary” is a deeply unnerving supernatural thriller that takes its dark spirituality seriously.

Like the recent, startling debut “The Witch,” writer/director Ari Aster’s first feature is more than an impressive exercise in style. It’s a meticulous parable of patient Kubrickian precision about the insidious devastation that’s left in the wake of family dysfunction, toxic relationships, the repression of trauma, and how each repeats itself across generations.

“Hereditary” turns all of that into a horror movie that feels profoundly personal. By necessity, it becomes a blood-curdling gauntlet for us to endure even as it feels like an exorcising catharsis for its director. Ultimately, it’s a cautionary tale for everyone about the dangers of ignoring your demons and the need to confront them before they kill you.

Set in the bucolic rural woods of the American northwest, “Hereditary” disorients our bearings from the start with a subtle visual illusion that makes us question what we’re even seeing, and what the nature of this film’s reality is. It’s a perfect palette setter for an increasingly deceptive, queasy descent.

Toni Collette plays Annie (in an award-worthy performance of gripping emotional abandon), an artist of still-life miniatures who’s been estranged from her now-deceased manipulative mother. Annie’s family history also includes depression, dementia, and psychosis.

Her mother’s death should be the close of a long, troubled chapter, but instead it unleashes a malevolent evil.

Each of Annie’s miniatures depicts a family secret but she’s blind to these manifestations and their voodoo-like effects. When they’re identified by her long-suffering husband (Gabriel Byrne, in a smaller but indispensable role), Annie flatly dismisses them.

Their creepy daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro, Broadway’s original “Matilda”) has abnormal looks, eerie ticks, and a tortured soul, while teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff, “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle”) gets slowly sucked into Annie’s unstable orbit. Shapiro may play the more iconic genre archetype, but Wolff matches Collette’s manic collapse.

Aster’s aesthetics conjure a palpable atmosphere that never resort to jump scares, subverting our expectations by setting them up only to withhold their cheap payoff. Aster has ways of making us wonder if our minds are playing tricks on us. He also intimates ghostly apparitions through fleeting movements on the edge of frame. His techniques are
masterful.

“Hereditary” may lack the woke social commentary of “Get Out,” but it’s equal in craft and more unsettling in its psychological torment and spiritual nihilism. Even if you’re agnostic to the supernatural, “Hereditary” disturbingly taps into something that’s undeniably real. Few films in 2018 will leave as big an impact, or mess with you as much.