Carter Moon’s review published on Letterboxd:
The biggest problem this film is going to have is that it was completely mis-marketed. This is essentially just a high-end James Wan or Blumhouse level horror, pulp-y fun with slightly better imagery. It is not a profound meditation on family and hereditary mental illness, the scars we're forced to carry on passed down from our parents. It's cheap thrills shot and directed to their full potential, and that's fine for what it is, but there are going to be a lot of people walking out of a theatre disappointed (and a good amount of people convincing themselves that they saw something more profound than they really did.) In a lot of ways, A24 is guilty of slapping the label for a 100 year old Italian wine on a 2012 bordeaux, but I don't really fault Ari Aster for that.
I do think we should expect more from our horror than this, though. We deserve horror that scares us in the conventional sense with atmosphere and tension, but which also digs into the dark psychology of its characters and the worst parts of their relationships. A movie called Hereditary should have done much, much more to explore the way family hurts us over time, and it's ok to wish there was more thematic heft to this movie.