When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited. Writer-director Ari Aster unleashes a nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown that exhibits the craft and precision of a nascent auteur, transforming a familial tragedy into something ominous and deeply disquieting, and pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain with its shattering portrait of heritage gone to hell.
Last year, A24 dropped some visceral, yet divisive genre films. Both It Comes at Night, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (even less than horror yet thematically relevant, A Ghost Story) received critical praise, but didn’t quite connect with the ‘normie’ audiences. It seems like Ari Aster’s feature length debut, with the assistance of Academy Award Nominated actress, Toni Collette (The Sixth Sense, Krampus), might translate. I mean…you saw the trailer…you saw that desk scene…how could it not?
I can tell you, with zero hesitation, that although I don’t know I’m getting into, Hereditary in two minutes, and twenty seconds, has become my most anticipated film of 2018.
Hereditary is set for wide theatrical release on June 28th, 2018.
