Ryan McNeil
I once heard a comedian say that the weirdest thing about a nightmare is that it’s your own brain messing with you. Fear, darkness, and even violence find their ways from the deepest part of your own subconscious to play out before your eyes and unnerve you at your most vulnerable. It’s truly freaky when you think about it, and even more so if one is unable to wake from the vision. What if these bleak feelings spark us into action? What if those actions have us harming ourselves…or someone else?
The thought is bloodcurdling…that our own bodies and minds could conjure such dread. Perhaps the only thought darker is if it’s a trait we don’t develop, but are cursed with from birth.
HEREDITARY is the story of the Graham family. As the film opens, the matriarch has passed on after a long, chronic illness. The family gathers at the funeral where her daughter Annie (Toni Collette) gives a cryptic eulogy discussing her mothers temperament, and secretive nature. More is eventually revealed when Annie goes to a group therapy session, and details the grim psychological trauma her extended family members have endured.
The scenes that follow introduce us to Annie’s distant-but-steadfast husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne). Likewise we meet their children Peter and Charlie (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro). Peter’s relationship with Annie is strained for reasons unclear at first, but he still means well. Charlie is deeply introverted. She wanders around in a perpetual haze, draws and crafts grim little creations, and seems most at home in her treehouse away from the family roost.
One evening a month or so after his grandmother’s burial, Peter asks Annie if he can go to a house party (he lies and calls it a school barbeque). Annie grants him permission only if Peter brings Charlie along. Peter takes the deal, and while at the party strays away from his kid sister. While his back is turned, Charlie consumes something that sparks an allergic reaction, and Peter – now not entirely sober – rushes her to the hospital.
On the drive there though, tragedy strikes and Charlie is killed. Annie becomes despondent; Peter fraught with guilt.
When Annie eventually tries to return to group therapy, she is intercepted by a woman named Joan (Ann Dowd). Offering great amounts of sympathy and communion, Joan convinces Ann to open up and confide to just her. Back at home, Annie is seeing shadows, not sleeping next to Steve, and wailing on Peter’s guilty conscience…so sympathy and communion are a welcome switch.
Eventually, Joan changes the subject, suggesting that she has a way to commune with the faithful departed. And wouldn’t you know it, Annie is just wary enough to try anything if it might invite solace.
…because if there’s one thing speaking with the spirit world promises, its solace…
The beating heart of HEREDITARY is the nature of grief in the face of loss. Pure, raw, unabashed, grief. It might well be the most intense emotion of all, and one we will all feel in our lifetimes. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – we try to avoid it as much as possible. We slink away, we clam-up, we stare at our shoes, and we leave the room. Grieving a parent is something we don’t want to think about yet, no matter our age. Grieving a child is unfathomable. There’s no manual, no set of expectations. Some of us will wail, some will withdraw. All of it is severe meaning it’s not something that we wish to see on-screen.
We don’t want to watch Annie mumble her way through a group therapy session. We certainly don’t want to watch her bawl on her bedroom floor. And yet either one of these moments could be ours in the future. These feelings could make us feel like strangers to ourselves. They could drive us to manic activities, or to cocoon ourselves under our covers. Perhaps most frighteningly, these feelings could drive us to some terrible decisions.
So it goes with Annie. Clear thought would prevent her from many of the difficult, questionable, and explicitly poor decisions that she makes, but her grief prevents her from anything approaching clear thought. She pendulums from distraction to desperation and always seems to make things worse and worse for her dwindling family. So it goes with the storm clouds of grief sometimes – you somehow find a way to take a bad situation and make it ten times worse.
The mourning that the Graham family is enduring would be bad enough on its own. Unfortunately, the whole story is made so much more chilling by an emotional instability that seems to be getting handed down through generations. This is especially terrifying since it suggests the terror is within us. There’s no hiding in the closet…no holy water…no silver bullet. The demons of the parents become the demons of the children, and there may be few more chilling thoughts.
The vast majority of us won’t have parents that dabble in the occult, but many will have parents who accumulate baggage that gets handed down. It holds us back from our greatest potential, and sometimes dooms us to dark and violent places. That’s the most chilling confrontation, that our fate is predetermined and there’s no way of breaking the cycle…like a record that has already been written. This is a story where two of its main characters spend inordinate amounts of time on artistic creations. Those artistic creations often manifest the most macabre ideas, leaving us to wonder if they are purging darkness…or inviting it.
These ideas alone would make HEREDITARY stick with the viewer like a pebble in their shoe. However, the film isn’t content to plant ideas on their own, and instead wraps every dark concept in bleak, haunting, and often chilling visuals. This film is brutal without being specifically violent…and much like life, that can sometimes be infinitely worse.
The temptation after HEREDITARY will be to turn on the light, to pull up the covers, to hide one’s eyes. It will do no good though. This is a story of the malevolence that courses through our own veins…and there’s just no hiding from that.
Great review! I so agree with your notion that the film relied on brutality, but not necessarily overt violence. And yeah, that can be worse. The sight of Toni Collette hiding in the corner of the ceiling, and pounding her head against the attic door, are absolutely more terrifying to me than anything found in a torture pron/gore carnage film.