Hereditary (Windy Hill Pictures)
After turning heads with his short films, The Strange Thing About the Johnsons and Munchausen, both of which were twisted takes on family rituals, Ari Aster returns to that theme with devilish invention in his bone-chilling feature debut. The movie opens with an obit for 78-year-old Ellen Taper Leigh, and to say that Grandma doesn't exactly rest in peace is an epic understatement. But Hereditary takes the core haunting element of a spirit with a malevolent agenda and runs with it in a seemingly endless series of unexpected directions over two breathless hours of escalating terror that never slackens for a minute.
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Arguably the most effective domestic horror chiller since The Conjuring and The Babadook, this A24 release should hit discerning genre fans right where they live. Aster's ability to modernize his obvious reverence for the expert mood modulation, visual command and layered characterizations that defined sophisticated horror of the 1960s and '70s catapults the writer-director into the vanguard of contemporary horror auteurs. The film's superb cast, led by an astonishingly good Toni Collette, represents another strong draw.
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Hereditary lifts from an adventurous range of influences that spans from the problem-spawn classic Rosemary's Baby through the malignant mood piece The Shining to the non-horror family grief drama In the Bedroom, with dollops of Greek tragedy and textbook demonology stirred into the mix. It opens with ace cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski (who stands to cop a major career boost with his hypnotic work here) establishing what will be the predominant visual style — unsettlingly slow pans from insidiously strange angles in mostly somber light. At the same time, the near-omnipresent underlay of composer Colin Stetson's rumbling score (which was not the final mix in the Sundance premiere) lays the ominous foundations for the symphony of churning dread to come.