If you enjoy disturbing, unsettling movies, I highly recommend that you see Hereditary. The film stars Toni Collette, who plays Annie, as she and her family, which include her daughter, Charlie, her son, Peter, and her husband, Steve, try to adjust to life after an ambiguous loss, but instead of returning to normal, they exponentially lose their ability to fully function as healthy individuals or a unit and never fully discover or address the source of their pain.
When I saw that A24 was distributing a movie that people described as terrifying, I didn’t trust it. I hated The Witch, which was in dire need of subtitles. I despised It Comes At Night and felt underwhelmed by Personal Shopper. I felt like an idiot for continuously falling for the bait and switch, the promise of a scary movie that only used a disturbing atmosphere to contemplate philosophical issues, but was never actually committed to its veneer so I didn’t rush to the theaters to see Hereditary on opening weekend. Because it isn’t often that a woman is the lead in the film, I decided to see it despite my misgivings. I saw it during an afternoon weekday showing with a sizable, enthusiastic audience. While I wasn’t scared per se, I was pleased that it was open to multiple interpretations without feeling like a cop out.
Hereditary is such an exquisitely detailed movie: the performances, the sets, the wardrobe, the sound production, which makes you feel like you are in the same room as the pencil drawing on a page. I saw it in theaters a second time and plan to see it once it is available for home viewing with the closed captioning on to see if I missed anything. I feel like Hereditary would pair nicely with Upgrade although the prior is superior in terms of quality. I was surprised at how much I related to the characters in the movie even though I simultaneously applauded the movie for not having any black people because the movie would have ended the minute that Annie went in her study and started looking at her mother’s things.
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A lot of people who have gone online to analyze Hereditary correctly point out that mental illness used to be seen as caused by demonic possession, but what I loved about this movie is that I don’t think that it makes you choose a theory because both can be right. Mental illness can be a biological chemical imbalance, but it can also be the result of trauma and leave you vulnerable. Childhood abuse affects adults, and this movie implies that the abuse never ended. As someone brought up as a Christian fundamentalist, I think that it is easier for audiences to lower their defenses by pointing out all the ways that mentally ill people engage in unhealthy spiritual relationships that encourage using, not nurturing their loved ones as tools to reach some elusive spiritual reward if that depicted religion is demonic as opposed to Christian. People with mental illness are more vulnerable to become drawn to a harmful religious ideology because religion validates the delusion of being special and vindicates all the horrible ways that an untreated mentally ill person will abuse those around them.
Hereditary is about how a family responds when that abusive element is superficially absent. The legacy is still there either by not confronting past experiences openly and calling it by its correct name or by genetically inheriting trauma through generations, which science is only discovering the extent of that damage. Annie ignores all the signs, including the writing on the walls. An early interesting point of the movie is when Annie says that her mother never apologized, which is not uncommon trait for someone who is mentally ill, never accepts the diagnosis and never gets treatment. In contrast, Annie feels guilty and blamed for falling short of her mother’s distorted vision of her life and society’s expectations for women as wives and mothers. She claims that her art is a neutral depiction of the events in her family life, but it is impossible to be neutral when you are inside the event. You can’t be the patient and the doctor. She gets some details right, the words and carvings in her house, and others wrong, the pole had the Paimon symbol on it.
Annie may be an adult, but her mother was still abusing her. By never successfully confronting and ending her mother’s influence on her life (her mother pressured her into having children, made her believe that she was sleepwalking then literally usurped her role as the mother to Annie’s daughter), her mother’s influence is still felt in the movie with or without the conspiracy. Annie may be a success, but she has little volition and never became an emotionally mature or psychological adult, which has a ripple effect in her family. The family ranges from polite and superficially warm, but distant to downright hostile. Like Upgrade, it takes dramatic moments of trauma to break Annie and Peter’s minds so they can be expelled from their bodies and the Charlie/Paimon can possess them.
Steve’s instincts were right. He tried to ban Annie’s mother from their life, but until Annie was ready to make healthy boundaries, it could not work. Steve is a medical professional, possibly a therapist, yet he too lacks the skills and words to address the problem. He only moderately medicates with pills or alcohol, which are only beneficial if it addresses the source of the problem, but does not encourage frank dialogue because he sees it as damaging to the relationship. His exhaustion and gradual erosion of empathy and sensitivity are highlighted in the scene with the red light, which I have done after visiting someone in the hospital. That silence means that the family does not have access to all the information, which benefits abuse. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but instead secrecy leads to more abuse and shame. Like most victims of abuse, Annie feels guilty and inadvertently becomes an abuser of her children. I don’t think that it is an accident that her complete break from reality is when her only tether to the real world is severed, the death of her husband.
It is unclear whether Annie actually has the volition to abuse her children when she sleepwalks. Is she being manipulated into a dissociative state by her abusers or is it her subconscious trying to save her children from the end of the movie, an anti Christ nativity scene? Or is she just crazy and we are seeing her point of view, what her delusions look like to her? By the end of the movie, her outfit resembles the clothing worn by someone in an insane asylum. Either way, it creates a division between her and her children, which benefits the cult even though Steve does his best to be the one to keep the family together.
Annie’s first act of abuse was to nurture her son and sacrifice her daughter. She replicated her own abuse with her daughter. I’m not the kind of woman who automatically thinks any kid is adorable. The minute that Charlie stole her teacher’s scissors and cut that bird’s head off, I thought, “Fuck that kid.” She is the only one that truly missed grandma whereas everyone else was relieved. Yes, she was a victim of abuse because her main caregiver, her grandmother, thought she was inadequate and was the head of a demon cult, but when they kept trying to bring her back, I was like, “Um, why? You’re lucky that she didn’t kill you the first time around.” I’m not sure how much of Charlie was Charlie since she never had any time when she was not under a demonic/abusive influence except for a few brief moments after her grandmother died. If Annie’s view of the world was a delusional neutral view rooted in denial and eventually obliterated because Annie was incapable of looking unflinchingly at reality, then Charlie’s view of the world was always distorted and destructive.
Peter was the most normal person in the family. He just wanted to party, and his artistic expression was music, not crafts, which have a sinister meaning in Hereditary. The most loving moment in the movie is when he scoops up his sister into his arms at the party. You never really see that kind of tenderness given and received in the movie. Once Peter accidentally kills Charlie, while swerving to miss a dead ram on the road (Abraham and Isaac reference), madness descends on him, and the signs of possession become obvious.
During my first viewing, I was completely baffled that no real world consequences were shown like him talking to the cops. What does it take before you can miss school? His mother’s guilt finally takes root in him, and he becomes filled with self-condemnation. Sleep deprivation is the first step in wearing down a person’s defenses and degrades one’s abilities to make sensible decisions, which makes Annie vulnerable to the cult, and she in turn deprives her family of sleep, particularly Peter. I loved the rational reason for the red glow emitting from the tree house, but it creates a visceral, ominous effect that later pans out. The red is reflected in Peter’s eyes. There is also the red of the taillights in the cars that appear when Annie or Peter drive. Just like her mom haunts her work and her house, Annie acts like a ghost by frequently staying still in the car and silently observing the family, especially her son, but not interacting with them. She echoes her mother’s behavior by having secret friends and activities and seeking relationships that are as manipulative and counter intuitively consoling as her mother.
Peter starts to hallucinate the rear view mirror in class then experiences the same allergy symptoms as his sister when he is smoking weed outside. Initially this response could be seen as psychosomatic sympathy pains with his sister, but it is the first attempt at possession. After the first séance scene with Annie and Joan, Peter and his mother have nightmares at the same time. Are they having the same nightmare or are some of the events being depicted on screen really happening? It is unclear, but they are linked. [I wonder if the phone conversation with Annie and Steve about Peter really happened or was another dream since Steve was not confrontational when they next encountered each other.] During the second séance, only Peter and his mother are sensitive to the presence while Steve can see what is happening, but does not feel it on the same visceral level. Charlie/Paimon possess Annie first.
His classmates don’t share his perception of the spiritual world and/or his delusions. For example, Joan may not be physically expelling him in front of the school. She may be at home. During the last classroom scene, Peter is briefly, successfully possessed, and Charlie/Paimon forcibly tries to eject him through physical force. Even his musical interest is destroyed in the final scene when a smashed piano leads to an unattached piano wire. The piano wire in turn becomes an instrument of suicide. Unlike his uncle, his attempt at suicide must have been unsuccessful since Charlie/Paimon was able to possess him.
Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. Annie and Peter felt guilty, but they never were culpable. They were victims of a conspiracy orchestrated by their grandmother, Ellen, who never valued her relationship to her offspring as people that she loved, but concluded that she had the right to determine what was best for three generations of people, her family, the people that she allegedly loved the most, without their consent. She felt like their creation made them her property and never considered them as autonomous, independent beings. Her view of what is best translates into self-mutilation and gruesome death. It involves being more honest and open with strangers, people who cosign her royal delusions, then giving those strangers enthusiastic permission to invade your family’s home, which is not her property, and destroy their lives. Hereditary explores the extremes of people saying that they have the right to do what they want with their children. She acts as if she owns them, and it illustrates how warped the phrase, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” is if consent and autonomy are not involved. The sacrifices are not worth it.
This family has no idea that they are celebrities to these people, who feel like they have a claim to them given by someone who never had the right to grant that permission in the first place. These are just some fans with no lives outside of people who barely know that they exist. It is so rude that these people are always at the fringes, waving or smiling at the corners, hoping to catch a glimpse when they can be seen, but otherwise when not under scrutiny, invade other’s property and lives in exchange for what? I will concede that they are great manipulators, but if Charlie is Paimon, she does not have much to offer. Her secret things were dead animal heads. Her knowledge was not terribly extensive since she did not seem terribly engaged with the world. She was fairly unconcerned with wealth since she was happiest walking around disheveled and sleeping in the cold. She would not bring much honor since she was terribly awkward at parties. Is this your god? They are just a bunch of naked sycophants looking for answers from a person that did not have them. They are bringing more to the table than they will ever get. They seem pathetic in their success. I hope that either the filmmakers or a viewer with more energy reveal which people who seem to appear randomly throughout the movie are actually part of the cult so I can weigh their words and actions differently during subsequent viewings.
For me, the saddest part of Hereditary is after the second séance, Peter emotionally regresses and starts saying “Mommy” in his vain attempt to get her to act like one. This is the worst time for him to start instinctually trusting and relying on her, but we do get an image of how a younger Peter reacted when Annie began to harm him, which is another tragedy of abuse. Just because you intellectually understand that someone whom you trust is harmful does not mean that you stop trusting them. Before that moment, in retrospect, he has a healthy distrust of his mother. Their conversations are tense, but nothing out of the ordinary if seen out of context as just a mother suspicious of what shenanigans her teenage son may get into when he is not under her supervision. Since the dawn of time, parents have saddled the older child with a younger sibling as a type of restraint from going too crazy, but in the context of this movie, she seems like a part of the conspiracy that helps set the Rube Goldberg device into motion. She is the homemaker manipulating him, and he discerns it, but there is something larger in turn that is manipulating her-in the movie, it is the cult and/or Paimon, but in reality, it is the filmmaker.
If you consider Hereditary on a meta level, the filmmaker is like Ellen. He decides to make these people, force them into certain situations, then torture and destroy them for rewards. We are like the cult, reveling in seeing what happens for some elusive satisfaction. Fundamentalist Christians are deeply suspicious of film, graven images. Hollywood stars are called idols. I don’t think that it is such a leap to consider the creative process a bit destructive since no one wants to hear a story in which nothing happens. Why do I love and hate the chalkboard with the threat of possibly making my skin crawl by making that sound or voluntarily watch ants congregate? There is something delicious in the dream logic of this movie and how it viscerally resonates on some unspoken level.
If you think the Paranormal Activity franchise insults your intelligence and Kill List was too esoteric and brutal, I think Hereditary is a happy medium (ha, get it!) that deserves repeat viewings. If the Winchesters were around or just one black person, maybe there would be no movie because everything remotely demonic would have been burned, but I think that would be a shame because Hereditary is a smart movie that is not afraid to really go there in terms of gruesomeness without being gratuitous while hitting on some taboo issues. I’m not sure whether or not the special effects will hold up in the near future. The dog dies, but we don’t see when it happens.