Domestic horror turns into pagan cult

Rating: 7/10 (14 June 2018)

Annie is an artist who makes dioramas. Instead of preparing for her next show, though, she is obsessed with constructing miniatures of her current home life, from her daughter's attic bedroom to the scene of her fatal road accident.
The first of Annie's delicately detailed boxes opens into her real world home. That means her real rooms seem to shrink into tight boxes, with constricting panelled hallways and oppressive beamed ceilings.
More importantly, as son Peter discovers, the real narrative of his life is not what's happening in his social, family and school existence, but on a higher plane altogether, where he is slated to serve a higher purpose. From that outside perspective his world shrinks to little boxes.
In his school scenes dissections of classical tragedy, politics and economics seem to evaporate as Peter is drawn into his larger destiny.
The film is a kind of Rosemary's Granny. The presiding demonic power is the grandmother whose obituary and funeral open the film. A private, secretive, strong woman, she turns out to have been the high priestess of a satanic order. Her primary aide Joan is played by Ann Dowd, drawing on associations with her role as stern housemother in The Handmaid's Tale.
As the title suggests, we see three generations of witch hood. The priestess's daughter Annie performs the necessary rituals and infernal sacrifices. For most of the film we read the psychodrama as Annie's story, buffeted between two deaths, mother then daughter. She struggles to sustain maternal sensitivity. That's where the film is most powerful, when it situates a nightmare danger in our centre of emotional connection, the mother.
When the drama shifts from family to cult, the key force becomes Annie's daughter Charlie (granny's favourite). She provides the spirit to be transferred into brother Peter's body so he can rule as King Paimon. The girl's androgynous name prepares for that transfer, as does her eerily otherworldly mien. As befits children innocently trapped in a larger destiny, Charlie and Peter both have severe problems breathing.
Curiously, for a film that celebrates the supernatural power of women - a common terror among male filmmakers - the women end up needing a male to lead them, in body if not in spirit. Of course they first have to pound him into shape and inject the feminine spirit - but even that mythology worships the male.
Are we to find that reassuring?