"Hereditary" Movie Review (no spoilers)

By Iain Aschendale · Dec 12, 2018 · 808 · 7
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  1. I just got back from Hereditary. No spoilers, but I found this movie very enjoyable in the classic horror sense of things. There are a couple scenes involving a cell phone, but they don't need to be there, and the rest of the movie could have been done anytime in the last forty or fifty years. That's a compliment, if you enjoy films like The Exorcist and The Omen, you may enjoy this film. There are no wisecracking evil menaces, no terrified teenagers in swimsuits or underwear, and no gratuitous jump scares, just a pure supernatural evil and a family's attempt to deal with it.

    On the critical side, there was one scene that I think may have had a set-dressing mistake, and I wasn't a fan of casting 68-year old Gabriel Byrne as the father of a thirteen-year-old and an eighteen-year-old (when my father was my age [forty-seven] I had already been honorably discharged from the Marines and would have graduated college if I'd taken that path). It's not a complaint about how he plays the role, it's just Hollywood's typical pattern of letting leading men play roles well into their, ahem, late middle age that should really be going to younger men. Toni Collette, on the other hand, is 46, which fits the character better and is fucking outstanding in this role. Kudos to the rest of the casting decisions as well, the younger actors and actresses look like, well, average teenage kids. The "beautiful girl" love interest is pretty attractive, but doesn't come across as having fallen off a Maybelline package or anything.

    So anyway, if you like the old style of horror, I'd recommend this film. If boobs and splatter and jump-scares that were only the cat are more your thing, I won't judge, but you'll probably be bored to death.
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  1. Wreybies
    We certainly do have different tastes in films. Here was my review when I saw it:

    Hereditary

    ... what?

    SPOILERS

    I don't know why I bother with "horror" movies, especially when they try to be psychological. I wanted to like this film. I love Toni Collette. Gabriel Byrne is a solid actor. Alex Wolff is charming in an "alarmingly thin, but will totally share weed with you" kind of way. I thought this film was going to be about mental illness (and maybe... it is?) because they certainly do spoon-feed you a family history riddled with the kinds of diagnoses that once meant a trip straight to the sanitarium.

    But was it really about mental illness? Was the strange occult part literal or metaphorical or hallucinatory?

    I don't know.

    This film has a nod-and-a-wink feel that says it's meant for a select audience, an illuminated inner circle, to which I clearly do not belong.

    Great acting, in truth, and a terrific cast. The cinematography was unusual and a metaphor in and of itself, but in the end this film was either really confusing; else, it was taking the piss and just being smug about itself.
    Wreybies, Dec 12, 2018
      Iain Aschendale likes this.
  2. Iain Aschendale
    Iain Aschendale, Dec 12, 2018
  3. Iain Aschendale
    My facial agnosia missed the key family photos, and the end was a little heavy-handed, but I still liked it.
    Iain Aschendale, Dec 12, 2018
  4. Wreybies
    It was the division between the bulk of the film and the end that really spun me. It was terribly tragic, and Collette's delivery of a soul who is lost in every imaginable way was inspired. As you know, boobs hold no power over me, but in that last scene where boobs are in evidence, I was like, no, no no no, I do not want to see Ann Dowd's boobs. I respect her as an actor, but... NO!
    Wreybies, Dec 12, 2018
  5. Iain Aschendale
    Y'know when you're just trying to watch The Real Slutwives of Capitol Hill and one of them has a NY Yankees cap (and nothing else) on, but the logo is blurred? Or when they black out the badge on a Porsche 911 at a car show so as not to provide free advertising, all while talking about the features of the new 911?

    What I was fascinated by was the showing of peen (ish) of whoever the overweight gentleman was. Japan used to have a blanket ban on showing genitalia or pubic hair, to the point where there's one old (Clint Eastwood?) film where the arrival of the nude woman in the dark is first announced by the absolute black spot where they erased her bush (against the slightly less black "darkness"). This policy has extended (and I may blog about this problem someday) to the point where History Channel documentaries on the Holocaust have blurs over the genitalia of... the corpses in the mass graves. Unlike the US media, when the contractors in Iraq were killed, burned, and hung from a bridge, the Japanese news blurred the bodies out. Fair enough, don't want to traumatize the "younger or more sensitive viewers," but the Holocaust documentaries don't blur the whole corpse pit, just the procreative bits.

    If you're looking at a pile of murdered corpses and getting aroused, you've got problems that a little pixelation won't solve.

    But anyway, back to Hereditary, there was no pixelization (in Japanese: mosaic, pronounced moe's eye ick, roughly) over any of the characters towards the end of the movie, which I view as a positive step.
    Iain Aschendale, Dec 12, 2018
      Lifeline likes this.
  6. Wreybies
    Interesting.

    Bear with me, I'm taking a turn onto a dirt road through a scary woods in the middle of the night:

    I was involved a while back in a conversation on a board where one can acquire spank-bank material and one of the providers was griping about no one sampling his wares. The wares in question are of Asian provenance, where the mosaic dynamic is, as you mention, de rigueur. I mentioned that I would happily sample said wares if only they weren't masked (that's the term in these realms). The provider waxed rhapsodic as to why masked is a must. I explained that I understood that, I was aware of that, but that when one is looking for wares such as these, masking out the object of intent is counter-productive. A bicycle with no wheels, or ones that have been rendered useless, is not a bicycle. I was called a racist. :/
    Wreybies, Dec 12, 2018
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  7. Iain Aschendale
    There is something in Japanese called chirarism. You won't find it in a dictionary, and I may have misspelled it, but it's the idea that that which is hinted at is much more exciting than that which is actually seen. Kind of the nipple through the tight t-shirt thing, although that would be rejected here as too overt as well. I kind of understand the concept, there have been a few times in my life when I've seen a woman in a heavy winter dress that's not especially tight-fitting but somehow manages to make me acutely aware of the fact that, beneath those clothes, she's nekkid!!! However, there should be boundaries to chirarism as well, and if the person of your interest (whatever flavor, color, and shape that may be) is being subjected (or objected) to aardvarking, be it singular, serial, or multiple, it's really gotten to the point that it's rude not to let us know exactly what's going on.
    Iain Aschendale, Dec 12, 2018
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