Hered­i­tary

To quote the immor­tal words of Philip Larkin: ​“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.” This poet­ic indict­ment of famil­ial rela­tion­ships is brought to mind by Ari Aster’s sear­ing cin­e­mat­ic debut, Hered­i­tary, in which the mem­bers of a mid­dle-class, osten­si­bly nor­mal fam­i­ly come to terms with the death of a rel­a­tive and face the strange days that fol­low her funeral.

This unfor­tu­nate clan are the Gra­hams, con­sist­ing of artist Annie (Toni Col­lette), her hus­band Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and their two chil­dren, Peter (Alex Wolff) and Char­lie (Mil­ly Shapiro). Annie works as a minia­tur­ist. She cre­ates exquis­ite small-scale ren­der­ings of real-life sce­nar­ios which pro­vide a cru­cial anchor to the sto­ry: as she con­tends with an impend­ing gallery dead­line as well as her mother’s pass­ing, it becomes clear that – as in her work – the dev­il is in the detail.

And what details there are to behold in the per­for­mances, chiefly from Col­lette as the fran­tic, frac­tured woman bat­tling inter­nal demons and the very real pos­si­bil­i­ty of exter­nal ones too. She’s game­ly joined by Byrne, who gives a sub­tle, stern per­for­mance as her increas­ing­ly exas­per­at­ed hus­band Steve, and impres­sive young’uns Alex Wolff and Mil­ly Shapiro who hold their own as the Gra­ham sib­lings. Wolff in par­tic­u­lar has a strik­ing vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty about him – rather than play­ing up a teenage arche­type, he’s wide-eyed and ter­ri­fied; a messy, shriek­ing, infi­nite­ly relat­able ado­les­cent loser.

The film’s intri­cate con­struc­tion is com­ple­ment­ed by Col­in Stetson’s unset­tling Gasli­ni-adja­cent score, and a rich, heav­i­ly-sat­u­rat­ed colour palette that works in stark con­trast with the pro­gres­sive­ly more eerie action that plays out against the small-town sun­shine. In the age of the oblig­a­tory jump scare there are griz­zly scenes aplen­ty, but Aster prefers a painful sense of impend­ing dread which begins with the open­ing shot and refus­es to rescind its grip until the final credits.

It’s pos­si­ble to iden­ti­fy sub­tle cin­e­mat­ic nods to the likes of Don’t Look Now and The Shin­ing – notably in Shapiro’s unnerv­ing por­tray­al of a creepy kid at odds with the rest of her fam­i­ly (com­plete with an orange hood­ie as unex­pect­ed­ly haunt­ing as Chris­tine Baxter’s red mac). Pawel Pogorzelski’s crisp, ethe­re­al cin­e­matog­ra­phy seems influ­enced by John Alcott’s icon­ic work with Kubrick. Rather than a deriv­a­tive exer­cise in genre scalp­ing, there’s some­thing fresh about the mas­ter­ful way in which Aster exam­ines the insid­i­ous nature of sub­ur­ban iner­tia while play­ing on the very real fear of what we inher­it from our par­ents, and in turn, what we pass onto future gen­er­a­tions, wil­ful­ly or not.

Part rela­tion­ship psy­chodra­ma, part ghost sto­ry, part explo­ration of inher­it­ed mad­ness, Hered­i­tary is a film which refus­es to par­lay into a set def­i­n­i­tion of hor­ror, which is its twist­ing, slip­pery strength. It begs to be rewatched, recon­sumed and res­ur­rect­ed so that some part of its spi­ralling weird­ness might become more famil­iar. Although there’s plen­ty of unset­tling imagery present that’s liable to haunt audi­ences for years to come, it’s Aster’s the­mat­ic ambi­tion which trans­forms it into a smil­ing, intox­i­cat­ing vil­lain of a film that gets under your skin and sinks into the mar­row of your bones.