Much as I dislike Renner, most of the performances here are solid, the music is superb, the pacing is solid, the staging works well, and it's overall nicely understated.
Sure, I agree with some of the critiques about some hamfisted white guy writing. But, in a sea of hamfisted white-guy-centric movies, this could do a whole hell of a lot worse.
Cronenberg's many strengths do not generally include particularly strong plotting - which is why this film is so darn good. The plot's already been taken care of, and Cronenberg's moody direction, Walken's powerful performance, and Kamen's sad-scary score mix together to create wonderful genre cinema.
There’s this moment in some horror movies when the movie gets to its equivalent of a song’s “bridge”: the melody of the verses and the chorus drops away and is replaced by something else. HEREDITARY tries to stay in that place for its entirety. The result is a film that - even though it is often masterful - just simply doesn’t have enough tonal range to support a feature- length narrative. Some of the blame for this goes to whoever…
