Some recycling here

Rating: 7/10 (22 June 2018)

HEREDITARY is a ghost story from the school of INSIDIOUS. An affluent family in a forested town in Utah experience spooky goings-on when a grisly accent kills their young daughter only weeks after they buried their beloved grandmother. The high-school-age son (Alex Woolff) goes rapidly to pieces, as does his mother, played by Toni Collette who makes her the most formidable character in horror movies since Kathy Bates in MISERY. Dad (Gabriel Byrne) tries vainly to hold the family together.
The key character in the story is a neighbour, Joan, also bereaved, who dabbles in Ouija-board-style spiritualism. Joan is played by Ann Dowd, whom we know (and fear) as Aunt Lydia in THE HANDMAID'S TALE. Like Aunt Lydia, Joan seems to mean well but we are obviously supposed to wonder about her true intent.
The casting of Dowd and Collette lifts this movie above the routine. Writer/director Ari Aster tries to give it the kind of epic 'grandeur' Stanley Kubrick brought to THE SHINING (a much over-rated film, in my opinion: it did not do justice to one of Stephen King's finest novels). HEREDITARY also has echoes of ROSEMARY'S BABY and that hoary old Hammer horror, THE DEVIL RIDES OUT. The ending is totally daft, and really there is very little that's new here, but you get a few nice jumpy moments along the way, and Toni Collette and Ann Dowd work very hard to elevate this story into the Gothic 'pantheon'.