Toni Colletta stars as Annie Graham, an artist who is coping with the tragic and sudden death of her mother as she is finishing her diorama of her family for an art project. Alex Wolf plays Peter, Colletta's son, in the film and Gabriel Bryne plays Colletta's father. All the characters are coping and facing with not only the tragic death of a family member but also with the numerous other events that plague the family.
Horror films have always been a staple to my love of films. No other genera can make me experience so many emotions throughout its runtime. Horror films can make you feel uneasy, tense, anxious, sad, and even at times hopeful. It is a genre ripe with possibilities and so many ways to take the audience on an emotional rollercoaster. However, great horror film has been in a decline lately. This genre has been plagued with cheap jump scares, cliches, and bad stories. However, Hereditary comes into the masses to show not only to show what a true horror film is like, but to also scare the crap out of everyone.
One of the ways that Hereditary is able to make the audience scared is through its cinematography. Director Ari Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski chose to shoot the film with a lot of long takes. Aster does not use quick editing or quick cuts to add horror; rather, he utilizes long takes to put the audience in a sort of frightening spell; putting them in an uneasy state when they are forced to stare at the horrific. There will be many long scenes with no cuts and at the start of the scene, you might see something right at the corner of the camera. As soon as you notice it, it will quickly disappear out of frame; yet, the camera still continues to move with the characters and linger on. As the camera is moving with or away from the characters, you sit and wonder, what did I just see? You start to peer at the corner of the frame to see if something will pop out or creep back into frame. Sometimes, something will come and it will scare you; other times, the scene will continue, gripping you in the unknown. It is the anticipation and the fear of what could be beyond what we are seeing that makes nearly the entirety of the film an anxious rollercoaster.
But outside of the horror element, the long takes let us sit with the characters and sit with their emotions. One scene in particular, which I will not spoil, where Toni Colletta's character is begging her husband to do something for her; rather than creating tension and emotion through quick cuts between the two characters, it is filmed in just one long take. By filming it in a long take, it makes you watch Colletta cry and beg her husband to help her in this nearly unimaginable situation she is in. It was such a hard, emotional, scene to watch, yet, Aster and Pogorzelski want us to dwell in the difficulty of watching the scene. They don't want to give us any breathing room to allow us to take a break; they want us to feel what the characters are feeling at all times.
However, cinematography can be great and all, but if the story and the characters are bad, then good visuals won't matter. Luckily, the story and the characters in this film are on the same level as the masterful cinematography. Without spoiling anything, the film goes into so many directions, with so many twists and turns, that it leaves you on the edge of your seat for most of its runtime. What really makes this film unique, is the aspect of the story of dealing with grief. This is not some typical horror film, where some paranormal activity haunts a family. Hereditary is a film with the themes of facing grief, and how we deal with tragic events in our lives. These themes and story beats are illuminated with all of the fascinating and layered characters of the film. These characters have to deal with events that we could never imagine facing, and the way their characters react to these events is just so fascinating.
These characters are boosted up by the top-notch performances from (nearly) everyone. Toni Colletta deserves an Oscar nomination for her role. The number of emotions she needs to portray and the amount of trauma that she is inflicted with, and how she is able to capture all of that through her acting is pretty remarkable. Colletta shows so many emotions just through her facial expressions alone. The way she uses her eyes, by enlargening them and by how she focuses and moves them during an argument, or when she is terrified, is such remarkable detail added to her character. Nearly everyone else in the film did a remarkable job as well. But, much credit needs to be given to Toni Colletta because every scene she was in, she clearly stole the show.
Past all the technical and story aspects of the film, Hereditary, is a horror film, so we need to talk about the actual horror element of it, and man is it scary. This is what real horror is like. There are no jump scares, or something running right in front of the camera to scream at you, not any of that cliche garbage. Rather the horror in Hereditary is portrayed through the depression and fear of the characters. After a series of tragic event, we see the slow destruction of a family. We see how they are all slowly becoming mentally fatigued and terrified; and how that then plays out with their interactions with their family. Seeing this slow descent of the family is terrifying for so many reasons.
It is portraying a regular, every-day, family losing and destroying themselves. It is something that, while many of us might not think about it, could happen to our own family as well. It is a reliable, an "at home," horror film. But, it is the way the film portrays this slow descent amongst the characters that really make it horrific. You see the characters getting mad at one another for irrational reasons; you witness the characters mentally hurting themselves and not being able to take the event surrounding them. This close connection with the family, and the destruction of this family, is one of the scariest things I've seen in a theatre in a long time.
However, it cannot be a horror film without some weird scary things happening, and this film has plenty of that as well. As mentioned before, sometimes, you will see something in the corner of the frame that quickly disappears. It makes you anxious wondering what it was and when will it appear again. As the film progresses, the film slowly becomes scarier as you get more information about the family. Not to spoil anything, because you really want to go into this blindly but you will really be caught off guard by many of the events and sequences in this film. The film goes from family drama to psychological horror, to even more bizarre horror, and all of these types of horrors add up to an anxiety-inducing horror film. Every act of this film has a different type of horror to offer you, and when the film gets to the really spooky, creepy stuff, it really hits it hard.
However, as almost anything you love, there are some aspects of this film that are not as amazing. Granted, these are nitpicking, but even the negatives of a film I love should be mentioned. For one, I said almost everyone did a phenomenal job in the film. While this is true, I did have mixed feelings on Alex Wolf's performance of Toni Colletta's son, Peter. At times, he did a phenomenal job. One scene in particular (if you've seen the film, you know which one) where the camera just holds on him and just seeing his facial expression really shows that he is a great actor. But sometimes, I did feel he was a bit uneven in his performance. Sometimes his character's persona would change and the way Wolf portrayed that was not as good as it could have been. Another small issue is pacing. Some segments in the middle did take a while to go through, and while I do get why it was done that way, I do feel like it could have been cut just slightly. Lastly, I feel that in the end, the film did too much talking to explaining what is happening. Really, leaving some ambiguity would have worked wonders. While there was ambiguity, the last couple of minutes does somewhat spell out the conclusion to the film for you.
Overall, Hereditary is a phenomenal horror film. It works as a drama about a family dealing with a tragic event, but also as a pure psychological horror film. This and The Witch (also on Amazon Prime) are some of the best horror films in recent memory. If you haven't seen it, please go do so. If you have seen it once, watch it again because seeing it a second time, there are so many scenes and elements of foreshadowing at the start of the film that you might not have gotten in your first viewing. Overall, a phenomenal horror film and an instant classic I highly recommend you all to check out Hereditary since I believe, in due time, it will become a classic
Score: 9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment