Philip Vandy Price’s review published on Letterboxd:
It's not difficult to appreciate the craft and attention to detail in first time feature director Ari Aster's Hereditary. What is difficult to appreciate is the narrative path Hereditary follows and how much it ultimately feels patched together in order to execute horror tropes that, in all honesty, it is too good for. There is one aspect of Hereditary that feels right at home exploring the continued ramifications and deep-seated issues that are passed from one generation to the next while being more than willing to take on and explore how family can really mess you up given the most extreme of circumstances, but there is another side to the film that wants to utilize this most extreme of family dramas to paint itself definitively into the horror genre and this is where the movie kind of falls apart. The upside to this is that Hereditary only begins to really become or at least fully embrace this unnecessary narrative evolution in the last fifteen to twenty minutes or so. Prior to this, Aster shrouds so much of what is actually going on in this questionable state of what might be happening and what is actually happening by building Toni Collette and her Annie's mental state to a point where her actions are in total question of reality. We're made aware of her family history and their bouts with depression and mental health issues very early while throughout the course of the film Annie experiences incredible and unthinkable traumas that would undoubtedly bring such issues to the forefront, but while the devolving security of Annie's mental state is what ultimately brings about the true, genuine horror in Hereditary it is also this avenue, this idea of how bad parents can mess up their children that is placed on the backburner in favor of the more genre-specific plot elements. It is something of a shame it's with this familiar bang that Hereditary decides to go out as it leaves something of the wrong impression on the audience given the majority of what comes before the final revelation is an unsettling more than it is scary exercise in pacing that boils each individual party to an intentionally uneven place of uncertainty, exhaustion, and just...pure misery. Hereditary is one of those movies that is easier to admire than it is to necessarily enjoy, but it seems Aster only ever meant to paint a portrait rather than entertain a mass. It's not difficult to appreciate the camera, sound design, and especially each of the very committed performances in Hereditary, but that this twisted dysfunctional family drama ends up being more dysfunctional than it does pure family drama leaves a simplicity to be desired.
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