Intense yet flawed

Rating: 4/10 (15 June 2020)

Midsommar was a solid movie (7/10). I also enjoy the other modern horror movies that are often mentioned along with this movie (The Vvitch, It Follows, It Comes at Night, The Lighthouse), so I was pretty excited to finally see Hereditary.
The movie starts with the funeral of Annie's mysterious mother and continues into their family's life after that. Every scene looked good and the eerie atmosphere was great as expected.
However at the 30 minute mark or so the movie got pretty annoying.
Charlie, the youngest daughter, wanders off into the woods to see the grandmother surrounded by a circle of flame. The scene ends abruptly when Annie takes her back to home and asks for Peter, Charlie's older brother, to take Charlie into a party with him.
If Peter had been a normal human being he would have probably said that he can't take the 13 year old kid into a party. He just looks apathetic and takes Charlie with him though he clearly didn't want to take her. That's dumb but okay.
In the opening scene it was revealed that Charlie has a nut allergy and of course it's relevant to the plot, why would they tell details like that otherwise. In the party Charlie ends up eating cake that has peanuts (they even show a girl chopping peanuts, jeez) and Peter has to take Charlie into a hospital. Don't know why she doesn't have an EpiPen with her.
When Peter is driving Charlie sticks her head out of the back window, only to get decapitated by a pole because Peter had to dodge a dead deer. I was laughing so hard at this scene, holy smokes. After that Peter just drives home and leaves the headless body in the car to be discovered by his mom and that's supposed to build up the family's tensions even more.
The party and the accident felt so forced that it took me completely off the movie. In the end it's revealed that Peter's grandmother was a witch or Satanist or something and they were preparing Peter to be a vessel for Charlie / King Paimon.
The last 30 minutes were really intense and I wanted to enjoy the movie overall, but the main conflict is built on a premise so ridiculous that I couldn't relax and enjoy the movie. I did laugh a lot, but that wasn't what I was expecting.
The accident was apparently based on a real life accident. It is so distracting and forced, I think it'd been equally silly if Ari Aster had taken any other ridiculous one in a billion accident and made it a major story element.
The parent's actors were great but the kids were a bit shallow. Both of them just had the same expression throughout the movie and felt like they were just trying to react at the silly stuff the script threw at them.
It's not a bad movie but I was expecting a lot more.