Every year there is a festival film that garners all of the acclaim and excessive hyperbole. This year's entry is Hereditary, and the praise is warranted even if the hyperbole is not. Hereditary is a meticulously directed and executed film buoyed by amazing performances; however, horror aficionados will recognize most elements quickly. Hereditary starts with a bleak atmosphere and oppressive feeling of dread and tension that ratchets exponentially into full crazy by the last act. What follows is a dark metaphor at how grief and madness shatters families, and this film is unrelenting in how far it will go in exploring the subject matter. For the vast majority of Hereditary, the argument could certainly be made a supernatural or psychological explanation could serve, with each being equally horrific. There are few jump scares, but this film is far more reliant on building a disquieting atmosphere and lingering on genuinely creepy scenes and performances. This is also for the most part a highly intelligent film, handling the clues and subject matter respectfully until the last act where everything degenerates into bedlam and info-dump. The ending will be divisive, as either one will enjoy the last act roller-coaster of madness, or laugh at the absurdity of certain elements. My gripes with the film begin about midway as characters engage in some exceptionally dumb life choices culminating in excessively ham-fisted exposition where the filmmakers suddenly lose faith in the audience's intelligence and capacity to follow the plot. Regardless, this film is an excellent horror film whose sense of dread will linger long past the credits.
Edit: Upon further reflection and revisiting this film again and again, the level of excellence this movie provides is exceptional. The layered writing, performances, themes and execution only gets more appreciable with each revisit. Even the more outlandish elements are directly inspired from grimoires and source material, and the filmmaker clearly did his research. As far as dumb life choices go, the characters in question are blinded by grief and being manipulated from the very onset by powers both human and otherworldly. This is one of those rare instances where I must unreservedly retract my initial assessment and rate this film accordingly: