Style over substance -- but what rich style!

Rating: 7/10 (18 June 2018)

"Hereditary" wants very badly to be a smart, allegorical horror-film. It is gloriously weird, and visually striking to boot -- but it never can quite make up its mind what it's about, and so it ends up being mostly about the fun of watching a really weird movie, for whatever that's worth to you.
That is to say, it's a film which tries (but fails) to transcend its genre trappings. Which doesn't make it a bad film -- rather, I'd describe it as a pretty great B-movie of the arthouse-horror sort. It's just kind of a shame that it's not better, because there's a lot of good material here, and much of it is sublimely creepy, thanks to excellent cinematography, fantastic performances, and some very effective sound-design.
The story begins as a portrait of an artist and her family, as they recover from the loss of her mother, who lived with them in her final years. Annie, the artist, was never particularly close to her mother; at her funeral, she admits in her rememberance speech that she always found her mother a "secretive and difficult woman." A surprising number of people turn out for the funeral, which demonstrates the extent of her mother's secretiveness. That, and frequent appearances of a mysterious rune, clue us in early that "mother" might have been involved in some kind of cult.
Annie's daughter, Charlie, is a slightly misshapen girl of thirteen, awkward in dress and habit, and suffering from such a keen social disorder that it seems likely she has autism. In the wake of grandma's death, she has taken to sleeping in the odd treehouse in the backyard, where she seems to think Grandma's spirit resides. "You were Grandma's favorite," Annie tells her. "She didn't want to have anything to do with the rest of us. But you, you were special."
Annie's son, Peter, and her husband, Steve, also figure largely into the story -- but to reveal too much more would be to give too much away.
Suffice to say, "Hereditary" plays out as a surreal, supernatural Greek tragedy, in which every member of Annie's family will inexorably inherit a curel fate. However, the theme that "Hereditary" is most successful at exploring is the way that individual family-members can damage each other, either on purpose or by accident -- and the way those wounds can create lasting resentments and loss of trust. If the film were only about that, it might be a stronger work.
But at a certian point, the film blithely introduces certain B-movie horror tropes which just seem goofy when contrasted with the film's more original material. For one, an outrageous "seance" scene which moves the film all-too-suddenly into "Insidious" territory. For another, well, let's just say that the film devolves into a tale of demonic possession which never quite succeeds at being anything more than the usual tales of that sort.
Also, there's a thread about mental illness. Maybe certain characters are mentally ill? And a thread about, ahem, heredity, and what fearful things might be handed down through generations. And when Annie's husband dismisses her suspicions late in the film, is the film trying to say something about female agency? There's a lot going on here. It's not necessarily bad that the film brings up all these notions without delving into each one, it's just frustrating that the film never seems to resolve into a satisfying thematic focus.
All of that said, there is undeniable pleasure to be found in watching a film which is as stylistically refined as this one is. The imagery makes bold use of color, which is a far cry from the standard desaturated look of modern horror films. The score careens, unhinged. One character's "tongue-cluck" tic is used to nerve-wracking effect. The family's house itself is somehow sinister in its endless number of hallways and doors.
And then there's this: Annie, the artist, creates immaculate dioramas of houses, of rooms, of her own house, of personal moments in her life. It would seem that she processes her emotions through the creation of these scale-model simulacrum of her life. The film finds an interesting visual gimmick in exploring these dioramas, and placing us inside of them, only to then reveal that we're looking at the actual spaces. The effect is a distancing one; it removes us from the action; it gives us the sense that the entire film is taking place in dollhouses of one form or another.
I feel like that visual gimmick neatly describes both the pleasures and the problems with this film. It's an astonishing visual, but the "distancing" effect it creates seems to work to the detriment of the film's action, and for no good reason that I could discern. Why does the film keep comparing full-size spaces with their scale-models? Why do the filmmakers want to distance us? Are we supposed to question the reality of what we're seeing? If so, why? I'm not sure the film provides answers to these questions, or even quite realizes that they're being raised.
You see what I'm saying. The film is largely style over substance. But fortunately, style counts for a lot in a horror film, and "Hereditary" has that in spades.