uncomfortably great

Rating: 10/10 (5 June 2020)

First and foremost, Hereditary does a magnificent job in causing the audience to assume that the crude events happening are based on (maternally inherited) schizophrenia, especially because the father, who is the only family member not to be a descendant of the maternal blood line, does not encounter anything supernatural at all. In addition, Annie's kin is described as highly
susceptible to mental diseases, including schiophrenia and depression. Throughout almost the entire movie I thought Aster was trying to emphasize the sometimes overlooked inheritance of mental disorders, or at least characteristics that lead to a probable development of such. I therefore enjoyed the use of Annie's modelling as a potential metaphor for her schizophrenia, because both - in her job and in her head - she creates concepts of life that more and more disengage from factual reality. When her husband writes a letter to assumably a doctor that roughly goes: "my wife is developing symptoms of a ... (cut)", I felt like the elephant in the room was finally mentioned within the dialogue, at least suggestively.
It is this emphasis in particular, plus the fact that the movie exemeplarily uses foreshadowing and therefore might make the audience think they can predict the entire plot, that made the ending come as an insane plot twist, since it reveals that all the creepy events are based on so much more than the fantasy of schizophrenics.
You need to watch this movie, and if you have, you should definitely watch it a second time to get certain references - a masterpiece!