Inner Dread PSYCHOLOGY AND FATE IN HEREDITARY

Hereditary (2018) – the debut feature from American screenwriter and director Ari Aster – isn’t just a horror film. It’s a psychological family drama, in which grief, anger, fear and deeply troubled personal relationships play out through supernatu-: , , , blurring of the real with the imaginary and, ultimately, demonic possession. As the name suggests, the film is a dark exploration of the ties that bind us, both natural and nurtured: to what extent do we have control over our own lives, as opposed to being inevitably influenced from beyond the grave?

At the film’s heart are the Graham family, who live in a large, isolated house in Utah surrounded by forest. The protagonist, Annie (Toni Collette), is an artist, obsessed with creating figurative miniature sculptures that replicate her life in intricate detail, and is married to Steve (Gabriel Byrne), a quietly spoken, pragmatic psychiatrist. Their two children, sixteen-year-old Peter (Alex Wolff) and thirteen-year-old Charlie (Milly Shapiro), live in their own worlds. While Peter spends most of his time smoking marijuana, playing guitar in his room and seeing friends, Charlie devotes hers to drawing disturbing images and wandering around outside, alone. As The Guardian’s Steve Rose puts it, ‘Everyone in this family seems to be shrouded in their own personal cloud.’¹

Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski blur(Roman Polanski, 1965), (Polanski, 1968) and (Nicolas Roeg, 1973) in its suggestion ‘that blurred lines are an existential condition and that really bad things seep into people with this many psychic cracks’.