Hereditary (2018)

At a glance

Director	Ari Aster
Release year	2018
Runtime	127 minutes
Genre	Supernatural horror, family drama
Starring	Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne

Plot

Annie Graham builds miniature rooms of her own life. After her mother dies, the family — husband Steve, teenage son Peter, and younger daughter Charlie — starts to come apart in ways that do not look like ordinary grief. Charlie has a tic and a habit of cutting things. Peter is sent to a party he should not have driven to. What follows is a series of losses the film treats as both accident and design.

Annie finds a note, then a woman from a grief group who says she can help. The help involves a séance. The house, already full of Annie’s models, starts to behave like one of them. The film stays with the family long enough that the supernatural explanation arrives as a reading of what you have already watched, not as a twist bolted on at the end.

Production

Hereditary is Ari Aster’s first feature. He wrote it after a short, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, and a grief script that studios found too bleak to finance as drama. A24 took it as horror. The budget was about $10 million. Principal photography was in Utah, with a house built on a soundstage so the camera could move through walls the way Annie’s models suggest.

Toni Collette was the first choice for Annie and the reason the film has a performance at the center instead of only a mythology. Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro play the children. Gabriel Byrne is Steve, the husband who keeps trying to make the events into a medical problem. Colin Stetson wrote the score. The miniatures were built by a crew that treated them as props and as the film’s visual logic: if the rooms are models, the people in them can be arranged.

It premiered at Sundance in January 2018 and opened in the United States on June 8. The box office was about $80 million worldwide. The argument afterward was whether it was a horror film or a family film that uses horror. Aster has said it is both, and that the cult material is the family’s inheritance, not a separate movie.

Cast

Toni Collette as Annie Graham
Alex Wolff as Peter Graham
Milly Shapiro as Charlie Graham
Gabriel Byrne as Steve Graham
Ann Dowd as Joan

Trivia

Aster has said the film is about a family being used, not about a haunting in the usual sense.
The treehouse was a practical build. Several late scenes were staged there at night.
Collette’s dinner-table speech is one take’s reputation and several takes’ reality. The scene is the film’s clearest statement of blame.
Charlie’s clicking sound was performed, not added as a library effect.
A24 opened it in the summer, against the usual October slot for this kind of film.
Aster’s next film, Midsommar, uses a similar structure: grief first, ritual second.