The damn formula

Rating: 8/10 (9 October 2018)

The first hour of young director Ari Aster's new film 'Hereditary' is absolutely faultless. It suggests a polished, contemporized version of Roman Polanski's classic 'Rosemary's baby'. Then a colony of ants appear in a dream sequence in a lazy 1970s-horror-movie way, and from that point on the film falls back into a more predictable territory: after the ants come the flies, the levitation, and the blood signs on the walls. If it fails to deliver on its terrific premise, it gives Toni Collette yet another opportunity to shine (the rest of the cast, especially a very stiff Gabriel Byrne, is no match for her). Without Collette's beautiful acting the movie could as well be a sequel to 'The Amityville Horror'.