So close to being a masterpiece that it's painstakingly difficult not to be nitpicky.

Rating: 8/10 (9 September 2018)

Even if you end up hating this movie, if you enjoy good films and are an attentive viewer, you'll likely agree that it was brilliantly shot. So much of the narrative was told with the camera alone. It's incredibly rare these days to see a relatively mainstream horror have the same constant attention to it's details and narrative that Hereditary maintains over its 2h 7m runtime. During which, I could literally feel nearly half of the people in the theater actively disliking it because they had no idea what was going on. Its constantly dreary atmosphere is aided by its phenomenal score, always driving the tension of the film without ever dipping into the cliche use screechy high strings.
Hereditary is about as slow-burn thriller as it gets (Rosemary's Baby being the gold standard for me), and honestly, it was incredibly disturbing - almost at the level of The VVitch (another gold standard for me). Yet, it manages to pull off something neither of those movies do: frighten the living daylights out of you.
This is where it starts to get frustrating to me. Hereditary is so close to being a masterpiece that it's painstakingly difficult not to be nitpicky. The leading cast was good, but somehow they all kept falling in the uncanny valley between cheesy but realistic, and down-right unbelievable to me. There were some truly great aspects of each of their performances, but there are a lot of emotional sequences in the film, and it became especially evident in these moments. Occasionally, this managed to kill nearly all of the tension for me, even making me internally laugh in some rather serious moments.
Even with it's issues, Hereditary just way too good of a movie to let my nitpicking bog it down too much. Definitely worth a watch for anyone who enjoys the aforementioned Rosemary's Baby or The VVitch.