I just watched Hereditary for the first time

A complete piece of shit, like everything that Ari Aster pumps out.

Had its moments, but overall, pretentious dreck

I liked it until the "please please please" scene that seemed to go on for 5 minutes. I wanted to slap the shit out of her. Ari likes to have hysterical screaming women in his movies.

no thonks

I loved it.

Absolutely thrilling for people who love great actress performances in horror movies

Toni Collette was absolutely robbed of an Oscar nomination

I loved it. It's not an easy watch-- the pervasive sense of dread is suffocating, but it's justified in the third act when the mystery is revealed and it all starts to unravel in a big way. I love films that explore the idea of "generational destiny" and can't think of another that does this so effectively. I also think Alex Wolff is a hottie and he, along with Toni Collette, are excellent here.

The lack of an epi pen is INFURIATING, Midsommar was much better.

Has Aster ever spoken of Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain as an influence? I'd have to watch both again (it's been a long time since I've seen HM) but there seem to be visual parallels.

I thought it was brilliant.

I thought there'd be more songs.

I loved it. It sort of felt like a throwback to 70s horror.

“Generational destiny” I would actually go further and say it’s about genetic destiny. The film is about the fear of passing along bad genes (mental illness, Charlie’s unaddressed genetic condition causing the facial deformity, her autistic like behavior, her allergy, even Alex Wolff’s mole.)

r13 in this case I much prefer a metaphoric interpretation to a literal one.

In the original thread, there was a great debate about Aster's intention vis-a-vis the meaning of the film. I'm of the Beardsley/Wimsatt school of interpretation; that is, the artist's interpretation of their own work is no more or less valid than the viewer's.

Hated it.

Why was Gabriel Byrne’s character so stupid in this?

Straight-up horror, and I loved it.

Excellent horror. One of the best in recent memory.

Toni Collette is amazing. That final act! The scene in her son's bedroom where she's clinging to the ceiling and crawls/floats out the door was chilling.

Agreed, r18. I think that part scared me the most.

The atmosphere is what really made me like the film.

I was all over the map with this movie. I hated the depressed miserable atmosphere that is established from the first shot. I laughed at the point where you can hear Toni’s character’s head hit the floor after she saws it off. But there were scenes that really worked too.

I felt the ending cheapened it a bit.

I'd have loved it if they'd cast Liza as Joan.

Casht.

I loved it.

I think it started out well & no one does the "Tormented Women" better than Collette - but then it just lost the plot & went completely off the rails. I liked it in the sense it felt like a new idea rather than a re-do of the usual horror tropes, but in the end it was just a hot mess. And I agree, the Byrne character was an idiot. I laughed out loud when he caught on fire

So this wasn't nominated for a single Oscar? That is very surprising.

I would have replaced Yalitza Aparicio (Roma was her first role) with Collette.

It absolutely deserved an original screenplay nomination over Green Book (which won!) and Vice

The year before, Get Out was nominated for a number of awards, so I don't think the snub was entirely related to genre.

Hated it and don't understand the love for Toni Collette at all.

She was great in this

I didn’t like it, but I think a lot of that had to do with marketing. I get they probably didn’t want to spoil anything, but the trailers made it look like pure psychological horror. No suggestion of anything supernatural. So I suspect I went in with the wrong mindset. But overall it made me more uncomfortable than scared.

Pretentious dreck.

Too long.

Fantastic movie that I love even more each time I watch it. Ari Aster is a true auteur -- small wonder that Scorsese admires his work so much.

I plan to watch it again r34

[quote]not since Mame has a film so divided DLers

Mame has defenders?

I absolutely hated it and posted to Facebook how much I despised it the day I saw it. But then I saw it again at home and then a third time. A year later, my Facebook post popped up as a “Facebook memory” and I had to share it again and admit that I was totally wrong, I’d seen it three times, it scared the hell out of me, and I actually thought it was an excellent movie.

So I completely understand the mixed reviews. I gave it mixed reviews. I hated it and then eventually thought it was brilliant.

I thought the actor who played the son (sorry I don’t know his name) was really good. I didn’t like the movie, but I did appreciate his performance. I thought Gabriel Byrne was badly miscast, but it’s possible I just hated his character so much I blamed it on him.

I would like to hear what people think of Gabriel’s performance, but also why was the character written to be so pathetic?

I loved Ann Dowd's performance. Her character seems like the key that unlocks everything.

[quote]I would like to hear what people think of Gabriel’s performance, but also why was the character written to be so pathetic?

I think it goes back to the info (as I recall) that she married her shrink (Byrne); my immediate thought was that he must be the worst shrink in the world because she's an absolute basket case & so are the kids! I think if they changed the story so that he's just some hapless schmo (maybe she met at some therapy session) who is as messed up as she is & therefore can't clearly see their problems. He also seemed oddly relieved when the daughter died. Again, maybe if we had more insight into his character & he *was* kind of relieved (or figured she'd croak sooner or later anyway) because he was baffled by her behavior (at least the mother *tried* to be norma). Instead, we get some old guy in a sweater who seems to have absolutely no idea what is going on with anyone

I don't understand the posters who say they hated it because they thought it was a psychological horror and were disappointed by the supernatural components. I think the movie makes it very easy to come away with a "metaphoric" interpretation, as an above poster said. These characters are obviously unwell, mentally. At a certain point, they are overcome and the audience sees their world through their eyes. Personally, I love the tension that exists with the psychological/paranormal dynamic. There's no one correct way to interpret the events in this film.

Great post, r41

Fair points, R41. I only saw it once and like I said, I was obviously in the wrong mindset. I’ll try to watch it again someday.

Hereditary, Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist achieve their scares by combining the audience’s external fears about body horror (mental illness, pregnancy and puberty, respectively) with a mise-en-scene involving the supernatural.

R38 Alex Wolff

I’m a big horror fan and this one left me cold. I just couldn’t figure out what the film was going for. The audience at the screening couldn’t either - we were all regularly laughing at moments that were meant to be scary. I thought it was all over the place and never cohered.

I think individual moments were scarier than the sum of its parts, like the daughter's clicking.

r48, that was us at Midsommar, in Atlanta-the whole audience laughing several times.

Love Colette in everything but completely agree with R25. Also,it did not live up to the hype at all.

I loved it up until the voice over at the end explaining everything.

I feel like some studio executive who couldn’t follow the plot made Aster add that.

Midsomar went right over my head r48. A friend of mine raved about it. She’s a real horror buff. After I watched it I asked her what was so powerful about it for her and she said because it was about loneliness. I did not find anything profound in Midsomar at all.

I know two people with really bad taste who loved Midsomar

I liked Midsomer.

I didn’t like Midsommar but there were things I liked about it. I thought that after they told Chidi from The Good Place not to snoop around and then he did it anyway, he deserved to die for being so dumb. But I like Flo, and I felt the beginning, finding out her sister had killed their parents, to be so traumatic that I understood why she was so messed up. And then the old couple hurling themselves off the cliff was totally shocking. And I actually liked the end. She she was high as fuck and they burned her cheating boyfriend stuffed in a dead bear. Going from tears to that smile on her face was creepy as fuck and also seemed like something a high, traumatized girlfriend might do (and it was sick and satisfying at the same time).

The Oscar should have gone to the street sign, as it was the most unpretentious actor in the film.

I enjoyed Hereditary, but it became increasingly tiresome. I call it 15 minutes too long.

Agree r56

It kept my attention until it fizzled out after awhile.

Ari Aster's career will be over in two more films. He's pretty much used up all his good will, and his films have pretty much been flops.

Absolutely loved Hereditary. it had one of the greatest endings I'd ever seen, where everything finally came together and so much of what you hadn't understood before became clear.

SPOILERS

I loved that final sequence in the tree house, which was much bigger inside than it could possibly have been on the inside. The headless bowing corpses, the dead daughter's crowned severed head, and then the final depressed look on Alex Wolff's character--now dead but possessed by the demon--made you realize he had no interest in being embodied on earth and being forced to acquire wealth for the crazy elderly worshippers. And I loved that the accompanying music evoked the prelude to "Das Rheingold." When you thought back about it afterwards, you realized the demonhad previously inhabited the dead daughter's body and that it didn't want to be in there, either.

I also loved the horrible relationship between Toni Collette's character and Alex Wolff's character (her son). The moment where she revealed she never wanted to have him as a baby was really shocking. And I love the scene where he drives home after his sister has been accidentally decapitated, and he knows there's absolutely nothing he can do, so he just miserably goes to bed.

Definitely the atmosphere and dread. A scene that just totally creeped me out was when the son sees a vision of the woman across the street yelling, “Get out, get out!!”

I thought some stuff at the beginning was too expository and dumb, like the dad saying to the daughter while she’s eating a candy bar, “That better not have nuts in it!” to let us know she has a nut allergy. He really should have asked that homely little thing, “Why the fuck are you eating a candy bar at your grandmother’s funeral?”

How did the Toni Collette character die? After Gabriel Byrne immolated?

And additionally, did the demon jump from the daughter to the father to the mother to the son?

R62, how did you miss the part when TC cut her own head off?

I thought she was already dead at the point at which she spirited herself into the attic.

Toni Collette not having been awarded an Oscar yet at this stage in her career, with the body of work she has behind her, is absolutely baffling. What’s the problem ? Maybe she doesn’t want to suck up to studio execs and Hollywood power players?

Which of her performances do you think should have been nominated, R65?

Weird movie. My question, insignificant as it is, has always been why the mother insisted the son take that little weird girl child to a HS party.

R67, I know, that did not ring true.

Why not just read the old threads for opinions?

The Wikipedia page says the son is 16 and the daughter is 13. So maybe not toooooo far fetched, r67?

Still weird, though.

Maybe because I wanted to participate in the conversation, r69? It's not my fault Muriel decided to lock threads after a year.

Not to mention, R67, who has cake at a high school party unless it was a birthday which wasn’t made clear. But the closeup of the nuts being chopped for the cake was smack you in the face foreshadowing.

Moms I know never sent a 13 year-old to parties.

Buck would have never forgotten his little sister's EpiPen

I love Toni but not this.

God, the actress who played the decapitated daughter was the ugliest thing.

She has a genetic disorder, r76