Spiraling

Rating: 9/10 (10 June 2018)

At its best, Hereditary is amazing, some scenes and sequences are beautifully crafted; no, seriously, the way this movie presents itself is perfect and I doubt (but hope) we're going to see another movie this year with as good of presentation. The camera work during some scenes is great, some shots linger on a characters reaction to an event, rather than the event itself, or instead of turning the camera towards a focal point, they instead follow the characters head as they turn towards it, almost teasing you and it works so so so well. I also LOVED the framing and the way they worked certain figures into the shadows, most dumb horror movies slam a black silhouette dead center, but this is so subtle sometimes that I wonder if there were a few that I missed entirely, and the ones that I did catch were very chilling. All of the acting (except Wolff) was exceptional, both Millie Shapiro and Toni Collette really shine and make this movie what it is, their performances could not have been better and I never once questioned them. This film is unique in so many ways and most of the time really manages to stay away from the dumb tropes from other movies in its genre... most of the time. At its worst, Hereditary has some pretty dumb moments, a few of them, and although typically not immersion breaking, they do drag it down slightly and make me wish they had done something (or anything) differently, a few of those moments falling directly into the cliche scenes it was trying to avoid, and felt like a Paranormal Activity movie. I also feel the movie ruined what could have been a 10/10 ending. Had the final 3 minutes of the film not contained a single spoken word, it would have been outstanding. I'm so upset that they took the route of completely over explaining what was happening and it definitely broke all of the immersion that had pulled me in. In conclusion, Hereditary is a riveting and spiraling film that is definitely the very best in its sub-genre.