Review of Hereditary (2018) by Benn C — 22 Sep 2018

The movie starts off with a panning fourth wall moving through a workshop. A workshop inside a house that deals in making miniature houses. You see many beautiful miniature houses fully furnished before the camera focuses in on one. The fourth wall moves into place of the house and the movie begins. This is interesting having smaller houses inside a workshop, are each house another alternate reality? Say the camera zoomed in on one of the houses across the workshop, what kind of story would have been told? The movie begins with the funeral for the family's grandmother. As the funeral goes on, no one seems to upset about the loss of her except Charlie. Charlie is the granddaughter and the youngest in the family.

After the funeral the mother Annie tucks in her grieving daughter an comforts her. After putting her daughter Charlie to bed she goes to her workshop where she makes miniature houses. Now in the beginning this house itself is a miniature house in a workshop. Until the camera zoomed onto it, that's all it was. Now inside this miniature house we have a women creating more miniature houses. All this is accompanied by an eerie instrument playing in the background. Throughout the movie when ever you switch rooms or location you just get the sense of something bigger at play. This raises the movies suspense level.

Shortly after we're at the children's school. More specifically where in Peters classroom. Peter is the son. In this class they are talking about a play called the oracle. They talk about how it was written for the main character never having a choice in the outcome and the hopeless ness of not having a choice. Being pawns in a horrible hopeless machine. The movie subtly makes everything seem small. Small in the sense that no one has a choice in this reality and they are just playing out their rolls waiting for something bigger to happen. Again, raising the suspense.

You get the sense through the movie that someone is always watching the characters. Not all the time, but there are moments throughout that just seem like you are watching through someone else's eyes. Someone who is just waiting. The Direction by Ari Aster made the movie. She made small moments exactly what they were, small. She didn't try to muddle the scenes with extra dialogue. That made each moment a variable, adding up to a bigger ending.