Review of Hereditary (2018) by Justin H — 07 Jun 2018

Highly Disappointing. I remember seeing the trailer some time back, about 6 months ago. I thought is was great. I purposely refused to see more, and never read an article. Then, this past week the buzz about performances and Oscar worthy were/are being tossed around for Toni Collette, which she did do a fantastic job.

Now, to the film. It's 2 hours and feels like it. The pace is slow, which is ALWAYS a bummer for a horror film. The audience loses interest, which happened here. Girl in front of me on her phone, guys behind us laughing and giggling at the scares, which is never a good thing. The Story itself is, at best, incoherent. You get ONE expositional brain dump of info that is super important about 15 minutes into the film, then, for the rest, not ONE shred of story progression is ever again introduced until a quick rummage through some books where there is some writing, I am guessing is important, but we are not on it long enough to read it. Instead, we get long pauses, stares, creepy music that leads to nothing, and some really great cinematography. After an hour of no story progression, you begin to work hard at remembering what was said because nothing else is making sense. It is a bunch of high concept scares, beautifully created and shot that, if not for being so boring in between them, would have been effective.

I am not really spoiling anything, but its about "The Return of The King" - Seriously, that is what it is about. Something about a demon king being recalled to earth for ????? That's it, I don't know the purpose. Neither did anyone else. The last 15-20 minutes are well crafted and could have been really thrilling, if we weren't bored by the previous 1.5 hours of the film. I lost interest.

There is some great work here, some wonderful performances and some really well made practical effects that could have been highly successful, if not for the boredom, as I mentioned. It reminded me of Witch, that I know everyone loved, but again, I found it boring and lacking in the story department. So, for me this is a downer, it was just too long for a horror film. No Horror film should be more than 1hour and 40 minutes at best.. In fact, I can think of just one horror film that was 2hrs and was great.. The Shinning. That's it.