Film Retrospective: Hereditary Weaponizes The Very Idea Of Suffering Against Its Characters And Us
Tristan Young @talltristan
Horror films, both classic and modern iterations, condition us on what to fear and how to see it coming. The separation of characters on a dark night. The uptick in terse, staccato scores. The fake jump scare that tritely attempts to lull you into a false sense of security when the guy with the knife was actually behind the other door. This is all horror film acumen, coded language that we for the most part decoded long ago. Conversely, we know at what points in a horror film we can ease off from the precipice of our chair, and stabilize our breathing. The daylight scenes purposed towards exposition dumps. The investigatory banter between surviving parties trying to make sense of what carnage or ambiguous event just occurred. These are often scenes of revelatory moments or great character work, but for the squeamish or mentally exhausted among us, we know when a film is giving us a brief respite from its intended terror. We are secure in our understanding of how horror works. Surely, a scene in which loving family members have dinner isn’t intended to chill us to our bones. Then we watch a scene in Hereditary, in which loving family members have dinner, and the film takes that security away from us.
Like so much else in this film, Hereditary, written and directed by Ari Aster is a film about taking things from us. Our loved ones, our understanding of the world, our agency and self determination, and finally- tragically- our willingness to fight back. Its horror is not inflicted upon us through terror, violence, or satanic panics in the attic (I can’t believe I found away to use that phrase in a literal sense), though there is plenty of that. Rather, it is through a careful, prodigious, and systematic dismantling of things we take for granted. Are the spooky, unnerving, and horrifying parts of the film spooky, unnerving and horrifying? Dear god yes. But even the myriad severed heads pale in comparison to the dissolving of the family unit at the center of this film, to the point where they lose not only each other, but their only hope to overcome evil in its most unabashedly pure forms.
Hereditary follows the lives of an affluent family, headed by matriarch Annie (Toni Collette). She has a stoic and loyal husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and two children Peter (Alex Wolff) and Charlie (Milly Shapiro). Peter, being a disaffected and ambivalent teenager is exactly as prickish as you would expect. Charlie, however seems off; introverted sure, but something else- asymmetrical even. Annie, and by extension the rest of the family must grapple with the loss of her estranged mother Ellen. Ellen was secretive and distant, hiding much of her life from her daughter, who in turn did the same to her, keeping her from young Peter as a child. Only with the birth of her daughter Charlie, did Annie allow the esoteric Ellen to reintegrate into the family.
If you’re reading this you know where it all ends up (if you don’t, stop reading, watch the film and meet back here). Ellen was the leader of a satanic cult that worshiped the Demon Paimon, one of the 8 kings of Hell. Paimon had been ritualistically inserted into Charlie upon her birth, however Paimon prefers the male vessel. Ellen never had access to Peter as a baby so Charlie was her only option. Upon Ellen’s death, her followers put her final wishes into motion. Extract the spirt Piamon from Charlie and insert it into Peter. Of course in order to do so, Charlie must die. And does she ever, in one of the most shocking and masterfully filmed deaths ever to make you literally scream out loud in the dead of night by yourself.
The broad strokes of Paimon’s needs and therefore the details of the cult’s sinister plans are broadly laid out in the film. However, a closer inspection of the texts that are briefly glimpsed regarding the scripture of Paimon don’t tell the whole story. Further reading into his legend implies that Paimon can not just enter another person’s body. First the target must be physically and emotionally ground down, to the point where they can no longer spiritually defend against his infiltration of the body and violation of the soul. Herein lies one of the central terrors of Hereditary, one that is truly chilling. In order for Ellen’s cult to achieve their nefarious ends, Annie’s family must be subjected to an ungodly amount of trauma and grief, to the point where it leads to an unrepairable breakdown of the family unit. Annie’s absolutely hysterical grief upon Charlie’s death is the beginning. It cannot be overstated just how powerful and vital Collette’s performance is here. The sheer agony and writhing contortions of her face, the apoplectic screeches upon learning of her youngest child’s sadistic demise is mollifying in its intensity. The results alienate her from her family as she is manipulated down a dangerous path of ritualistic and spiritual experimentation. Her obsessive desire to reconnect with the departed daughter even at the expense of Peter, who is having serious issues processing the enormity of what he has done cracks their relationship. The extremes risks she will subject her mental stability to is an affront to Steve’s desires to grieve and eventually heal. The dark secret of how she failed Peter and Charlie as a parent years prior creates an astonishingly unhealthy and hostile game of brinksmanship between her and Peter over who will apologize first. Who will mean it more.
That suffering is used against them to rip them apart. The cascading ripples of familial trauma, paranoia, and blame circle from each family member to the next, like a tightening noose. Annie’s prioritizing her dead daughter over her marriage and son is deeply hurtful to Steve. Peter feels more disconnected from Annie than ever as she slips away from lucidity further and further with each passing attempt to reach Charlie. By the time the family dinner scene unfolds, with the all the explosive vitriol unleashed between Peter and Annie, you realize they aren’t going to make it. We are trained as viewers to expect films to focus on the strength of familial bonds, how they will embolden us to face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The power of love. Instead we see these relationships deteriorate in real time and at an accelerated pace. The fidelity of it is terrifying. As the film progresses poor Steve can’t help but collapse into tears, overwhelmed by the totality and unrelenting pace at which his family has been torn asunder. By the time he is brunt to a crisp by Piamon’s machinations and Annie has succumbed to his possession, Peter truly is worn down to a state of emotional exhaustion.
That sense of manipulation speaks to another existential horror Hereditary so effectively communicates. We can wrap our head around any number of films in which some dummy opens the wrong door. Don’t open any doors! Why would he or she choose to do that? In Hereditary, it’s no choice at all. The film in starkly clear metaphors and subtle hints (such as early discussions of ancient Greek tragedies in Peter’s high school class) lays out the argument that Annie’s family never had any control over their fate. Their destiny was not manifest, their agency had been stripped away from them by Ellen years before the film ever started. The horrific fate of all of them was predetermined. This is communicated through fascinating visual language right form the get go with the doll houses. As a vocational miniaturist, Annie has dozens of mock ups in her work space at home, including one of her own house. Hereditary’s cinematography goes to great lengths to confuse the viewer at times, making them question if shots of the inanimate house are the real thing or excruciating close ups of the doll house. The real house was even built on a sound stage custom for this film, so they could remove walls, ceilings, and parts of the floor to angle the camera just right, to make it seem like the inside of the doll house. The idea here is to depict Annie and her family as playthings in a toy house, completely at the mercy of external factors, in this case being Ellen’s cult. They have no agency, no control over what they do, constantly being positioned and removed at the behest of something they cannot comprehend, nor even be aware of. This existential concept is far more unsettling than any amount of blood shed gratuitously poured by modern day torture porn. By taking away our ability to make our own decisions, even the wrong decisions, the film comes to depict a ritualistic sacrifice told from the perspective of the sacrificial lamb.
There is one final way Hereditary, in a heretic like fashion, defiles our language and understanding of how cinema works. One more thing it cruelly takes from us: A main character. Like pretty much every other film, Annie, our protagonist, is our means of seeing and understanding the world. It’s from her view point we learn about the progression of the narrative. It’s her motivations, increasingly twisted as they are, that the film presents us with. Whether or not we like her or empathize with her enough to accept her conduct, she is the connective tether for the viewer from our universe into that of Hereditary. When the last 20 minutes of the film see Annie fully possessed by Paimon, we are detached from our tether. Instead we find ourselves experiencing the world through Peter now; overwhelmingly confused, terrified to the point of paralysis. If fear is based on what we don’t understand, Hereditary removes any semblance we have of understanding, any comfort from it; and does so just as things get bat shit crazy. By cutting us loose from Annie’s perspective we are lost at sea amidst a storm of some pretty messed up imagery. That we must now experience this through a character we don’t know as well, who’s motivations were never really the focus of the film, is incredibly disorienting. It’s a mean trick, one worthy of the harrowing abuse Peter must endure before his body is primed for Paimon. Unlike so many horror film climaxes where the main character finally steels themselves for a final confrontation after several acts of learning more and more, our main character is now Peter, who has taken no effort to understand the enormity of his danger. He is not ready, and therefore neither are we. That is never more evident than when he looks up at his mother that one last time.
You’re not supposed to be ready for Hereditary. It doesn’t play fair or acknowledge your rules of how horror films work. It makes the downtime just as nauseating as the scary parts. It makes the notion of suffering far more dangerous than the implicit powers of a demon with a dumb name. It’s less your body or soul at risk than your understanding of how the world, and the films within it are supposed to work. It takes and takes and gives nothing in return. It want’s everything from you, and even before the film starts, it knows it will get it.