Headless Horseman

Rating: 5/10 (15 June 2018)

This is going to be a hard review. In another review I've posted, for "Annihilation", I talked about a fairly solid film that was undone by a catastrophic ending. "Hereditary" is almost the mirror opposite. Despite a gnawing sense of tension throughout the 90 minutes I think my most common sensation was one of boredom. Indeed there were some people leaving the Cinema during this time and not returning. However, what they missed was a gloriously insane last twenty five minutes, which almost, but if I am honest doesn't quite, make up for the journey to get there.
The performances throughout are particularly strong though. Toni Colllette is great, Oscar worthy is a fair assessment, although I'm sure that as a genre film and length of time to next March will mean it's forgotten by then. Alex Wolff too is excellent and I particularly liked how he reverted to a younger child crying for his Mummy during the later scenes, it was a brave choice not to try and hold onto any cool detachment and just go for it.
The film looks beautiful and the idea that Annie creates models of her house and of scenes from her life that interacts with actual sets of the movie works well (if that never actually pays off into the actual movie at all). The tension is slowly ratcheted up across those initial minutes, as the film toys with the idea that something supernatural is going on against the idea that mental illness or schizophrenia runs in this family and is affecting the grief that befalls them - but there's just too much of it... It goes on too long with family members either not sufficiently curious or deciding to get the hell out of the house, or away from each other, than is realistic. The music and sound design really feeds into this, with a low off putting buzzing adding to the sense of dread.
Then there's the ending.
I liked it. I expect that for some who weren't paying attention it does rather come out of nowhere and I too was with an audience that laughed at some of it but this gloriously OTT finale really worked for me. Enough to earn it two extra stars on my score.