Let’s get one thing straight: Hereditary isn’t a horror movie. It’s an anxiety disorder with a production budget. Written and directed by Ari Aster in 2018, this is the kind of film that gets called “elevated horror” by critics who get turned on by grief metaphors and rooms full of tiny furniture. What it really is: The Babadook if the book was replaced with a Wikipedia article about demonology and the monster was just crippling generational dysfunction… plus a decapitated child. Merry Christmas.
The plot is deceptively simple until it gets aggressively stupid. Toni Collette plays Annie, an emotionally frayed artist who makes miniature dioramas of traumatic moments in her life because apparently journaling wasn’t bleak enough. Her mother dies—good riddance, apparently—and this kicks off a slow descent into existential and supernatural chaos that includes séances, cults, possession, burning corpses, and one very unfortunate allergy to nuts.
Annie’s family includes her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne), who looks like he lost a bet and wandered onto the set, her stoner son Peter (Alex Wolff), and her unsettling daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), who makes weird clicking noises and cuts off bird heads for fun. You know, typical tween girl things.
Charlie dies early in the film in what may be the most absurdly tragic—and weirdly hilarious—scene in modern horror history. She eats a piece of cake with nuts, goes into anaphylactic shock, sticks her head out of a car window for air, and—WHAM—decapitated by a telephone pole like a piñata filled with trauma. It’s gruesome, yes, but also so cartoonishly specific you wonder if Ari Aster is just running a long con on people who take horror way too seriously.
Peter reacts by sitting silently in his car for eight hours, which is exactly what you’d do if you were baked out of your skull and just beheaded your sister in a panic-induced Uber ride. From here, the film morphs from family drama with uncomfortable silence into satanic panic with naked people in your attic. There are books about demon kings, creepy light trails, and an increasingly unhinged Toni Collette screaming at her son like she’s auditioning for a Greek tragedy on ketamine.
Let’s talk about Collette’s performance. Critics fawned over it like she’d just reinvented acting itself, but really, it’s two hours of ugly crying, jaw clenching, and primal yelps of psychological despair. It’s fine. It’s committed. But it’s also a bit much. Watching Collette flail around the living room like an exorcised Muppet makes you wonder if horror movies have forgotten that subtlety used to be a thing.
Then there’s the séance subplot, where Annie gets roped into communicating with Charlie through a grieving woman named Joan (Ann Dowd, showing up like a cult recruiter disguised as a Walgreens clerk). Suddenly, Annie’s talking to ghosts, drawing triangles on the ceiling, and accusing her husband of sabotage. The family disintegrates faster than Peter’s GPA.
Gabriel Byrne, meanwhile, does his best impression of a tranquilized history professor, spending most of the movie looking mildly inconvenienced while his wife screams about spiritual warfare and floating candles. He burns alive halfway through the movie, which is shocking, yes—but mostly because it means we’re stuck with just Annie and Peter to carry the rest of the film, which is like handing the keys to a haunted house over to two hallucinating squirrels.
By the third act, things go fully batshit. Peter, wracked with guilt and acne, starts seeing apparitions and smashes his own face into a desk like he’s reenacting the SATs. Annie finds her mother’s decapitated corpse in the attic, positioned like a museum exhibit on madness. There’s a lot of naked old people grinning in corners, which is a bold artistic choice if your goal is to make the audience physically uncomfortable and deeply confused.
Eventually, Annie gets possessed, starts crawling on the ceiling like a spider on PCP, and tries to kill Peter with piano wire. Peter jumps out the window, dies (or doesn’t), and wakes up as the reincarnation of the demon Paimon, who is apparently a big deal in the eighth circle of Google searches for “occult stuff that sounds scary.”
The film ends with Peter/Paimon standing in a treehouse surrounded by nude cultists as they crown him the new host for evil. It’s silent. It’s surreal. And it makes absolutely no sense unless you’ve read the director’s notes, the shooting script, and half of The Lesser Key of Solomon.
But here’s the thing—Hereditary wants you to think it’s smarter than it is. It mistakes ambiguity for profundity. It dangles grief, trauma, and mental illness like shiny keys in front of a baby, then throws in some witches and beheadings and dares you to call it nonsense. It’s not terrifying. It’s trying to be terrifying. There’s a difference.
Ari Aster is less a horror director and more an emotional sadist with a camera. Every shot is composed like a museum piece. Every sound design cue is loaded with dread. And every scene is dragged out just long enough to make you question whether you’re still watching a movie or slowly slipping into purgatory with the rest of the characters.
Yes, Hereditary has atmosphere. Yes, it has style. But that’s not enough. You can wrap garbage in gold foil and it’s still garbage. The scares are cheap (jump cuts and shadowy figures), the pacing is glacial, and the payoff is so convoluted it feels like you missed an entire prequel trilogy.
Final Verdict?
Hereditary is a film about grief, trauma, and the kind of inherited madness that only makes sense if you’ve had a séance in an antique dollhouse. It’s artful, sure. But it’s also overlong, overwrought, and overwritten—less a horror film and more a two-hour therapy session sponsored by The Occult Channel. Watch it if you enjoy watching people cry while slowly getting possessed, or if you’ve always wanted to see a beheading delivered by allergy. Everyone else? Take your meds, skip the treehouse, and let Paimon crown someone else. You’ve suffered enough.
