Hereditary

[scenicdesign71]

After anticipating this film (and keeping myself unusually spoiler-free, by my standards) for the past month or so, I finally saw it tonight, and emerged:

• intermittently spooked;

• intermittently impressed by the direction (by first-timer Ari Aster) and performances (notably Toni Collette, making a five-star meal of the lead role, but the entire ensemble turns in solid work);

• somewhat bemused by its batshit-crazy ending (which, however well-integrated in retrospect -- and however deliberate the sense, as you're watching, of it bringing the entire movie down in flames... kind of, well, brings the entire movie down in flames); and

• rather baffled indeed by the almost unanimously rapturous reception it's gotten.  Claims that Hereditary represents a decisive shift in the horror genre actually constitute the timid end of the critical spectrum; somewhere in the middle, you have reviewers exulting over the film's supposed ability to permanently and profoundly alter the brain chemistry of all who see it; and, at the far end, there are a surprising number of fanatics who not only brook no competition for Collette's Oscar next year, but who seem barely able to resist concluding that no more movies (of any genre) need henceforth be made, because Aster has won filmmaking, full stop.

And here I thought it was just a promising, if uneven, feature debut fusing hoary horror tropes with family psychodrama (the former buffed to a high sheen, the latter sometimes bracingly ugly): a kind of classed-up Pet Sematary with luxury casting, elegant production design, shrewdly restrained cinematography and perhaps just a bit too much affection for arthouse-horror tropes of the 1960s and 70s.

Then again, I was likewise a bit nonplussed by The Babadook, which I finally watched on Netflix a few nights ago; and more academically impressed than viscerally disturbed by Get Out, which I saw last year sometime after it came out on DVD.

In theory, I feel like I should be a pretty receptive viewer for so-called "elevated horror," and I'll admit to a certain queasy fascination with the kinds of scary movies that get described using terms like upsetting or punishing or bleak or traumatic.  (I rarely end up actually seeing many films thus described, however -- and when I do, such words usually turn out, for better or worse, to have been mostly hype).  At their beginnings, as relatively formless exercises in atmospheric dread, I'm with these films 100%; the point at which they slip over into clumsy allegory is where they tend to lose their hold on me.

It doesn't help that they often seem like self-conscious retreads of well-worn archetypes.  In particular, there's a lot of Rosemary's Baby running through several of these newer movies (including Mother! as well, I gather, though I haven't seen it) -- and here I should admit that the ending of Polanski's film has always left me kinda shrugging.  For that matter, in terms of pure shivers, even The Exorcist starts to lose a bit of steam at around the point where it starts stone-facedly requiring me to credit a tissue of Catholic arcana as a serious explanation for its horrors.  (Fortunately, with enough stubbornness, it is actually possible to make it up until almost its final reel without bothering much about explanations).  In general, while I can at times take supernatural elements seriously enough to be genuinely scared by them, those particular buttons aren't the easiest of mine to push; I think the last movie that really succeeded in doing so was The Sixth Sense -- Collette's first Oscar bid, coincidentally -- almost 20 years ago.

Perhaps I should try getting high before watching these things?  (...although, on the other hand, under those circumstances I'm not sure I could handle it if they actually were to prove "punishing" or "traumatic"; the mere description of a particularly horrific scene from Luca Guadagnino's upcoming Suspiria remake has me highly doubtful whether I want to see the movie at all, much less in any kind of chemically vulnerable state).

So that's me and horror: fascinated up to a point, but fainthearted-enough to avoid it much of the time, and picky enough to be unsatisfied by most of what I do see.  And then, every now and then, something will get under my skin unpleasantly enough to justify the faint-heartedness and keep me away from the genre for awhile.  (Most recently, a graphic murder-by-stoning from the first season of The Leftovers stayed with me, for months, as something I really wished I could un-see -- unflinching, sickeningly plausible human-on-human violence -- and, while the series obviously has its supernatural gambits, on the whole it doesn't even really fit under the rubric of "horror" as such).