Ari Aster’s Hereditary kills its most vulnerable character before the halfway mark, and the film never recovers — which is exactly the point. The 2018 horror film, Aster’s feature directorial debut, runs 128 minutes and carries the tagline “Every family tree hides a secret.” It earns that line.
Hereditary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2018, and opened in United States theaters on June 8. It grossed $90 million against a $10 million production budget. It is frequently listed as one of the scariest movies ever made.
Trailer, via A24.
Toni Collette as Annie Graham
The film follows Annie Graham, a miniature artist living in northern Utah with her psychiatrist husband Steve and their two children, 16-year-old Peter and 13-year-old Charlie. The family attends the funeral of Annie’s estranged mother, Ellen. Annie is surprised by how many mourners show up.
Toni Collette was one of the first actresses Aster sought for the role. She was reluctant to work on a horror film. The script’s grounded approach convinced her to commit.
Collette later said Aster “just really understood the dynamics in the family, has such an understanding of what it is to be human, what it is to experience loss.”
That quote is the whole movie in one sentence. Annie’s grief is not a mood. It is the engine.
Charlie and the Telephone Pole
Charlie is especially affected by Ellen’s death. She becomes withdrawn and sullen. She worries about who will take care of her when Annie dies.
At school, Charlie beheads a dead bird with scissors and pockets the head.
At a bereavement support group, Annie reveals that she and her mother had a strained relationship. Ellen suddenly became a significant figure in raising Charlie after she was born.
Steve gets a phone call: unknown perpetrators have vandalized Ellen’s gravesite. He keeps it from Annie.
Peter is invited to a party. Annie insists that Charlie accompany him. Peter leaves her unattended. Charlie eats a piece of cake containing walnuts, triggering her severe nut allergy and sending her into anaphylactic shock.
Peter drives her to the hospital. Charlie leans out the window to gasp for air. Peter swerves to avoid a dead deer in the road. A telephone pole decapitates her.
That sequence is the hinge of the film. It is also the moment Hereditary stops being a family drama about grief and becomes something else.
Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro
Peter drives home in shock and leaves Charlie’s headless body in the back seat of Annie’s car. Annie finds it the following morning.
Alex Wolff plays Peter. He previously collaborated with Gabriel Byrne, who plays Steve, on the HBO series In Treatment. That shared history gives the father-son scenes a weight the script alone does not supply.
Milly Shapiro was 14 and making her cinema debut. She came from Broadway. Aster was immediately relieved after watching her audition.
He had left Charlie’s personality more ambiguous than the other characters in the script. He knew the “chances were slim” that he would find the right actress. Shapiro is the reason the first act works.
Ann Dowd as Joan
After Charlie’s funeral, Peter becomes reclusive and guilt-stricken. Annie becomes bitter and resentful toward Peter. Steve tries to mediate peace between them.
An unspecified amount of time later, Annie befriends fellow support group member Joan. Ann Dowd plays her. Joan encourages Annie to communicate with Charlie’s spirit via séance. She demonstrates her own ability to contact her deceased grandson Louie.
Dowd is doing quiet, patient work here. Joan is the most dangerous person in the film precisely because she never raises her voice.
A Dollhouse in Salt Lake City
Aster’s short horror films, most notably The Strange Thing About the Johnsons, attracted the attention of A24. The company greenlit Hereditary as his first feature.
Aster conceived it as primarily a family drama consisting of two distinct halves.
Principal photography commenced in Salt Lake City in February 2017. Most of the indoor scenes were shot on custom built sets on a soundstage to give the film a dollhouse aesthetic.
That aesthetic is not decoration. Annie builds miniatures for a living. The film shoots her family the way she shoots her dioramas — from above, at a remove, as something arranged.
Aster has an uncredited voice cameo as Annie’s art dealer, who calls to offer support after the tragedy. Pat Barnett Carr makes an uncredited appearance as Ellen Leigh, Annie’s deceased mother. Aster refers to her as “the sweetest person in the world.”
Release Schedule and Production Facts
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| February 2017 | Principal photography begins in Salt Lake City |
| January 21, 2018 | Premieres at the Sundance Film Festival |
| June 8, 2018 | Theatrical release in the United States |
Runtime: 128 minutes. Genres: horror, mystery, thriller.
The budget-to-gross ratio is the number that matters commercially. A $10 million production returning $90 million is the kind of result that changes what studios are willing to fund. Hereditary did not invent the modern art-horror boom, but it is one of the films that proved the model.
What Hereditary Gets Right
Aster’s two-halves structure is the film’s smartest decision and its biggest risk. The first half is a family drama. The second half is a supernatural psychological horror film. The seam between them is Charlie’s death.
Most horror films treat grief as backstory. Hereditary treats it as the subject. Annie’s resentment toward Peter is not a plot device. It is the most believable thing in the movie.
The miniature work carries the theme without a single line of explanation. Annie controls tiny versions of rooms she cannot control in life. The soundstage sets complete the joke.
Collette’s performance is the anchor. She plays Annie’s collapse in stages, and the stages are legible.
- Shock at Ellen’s funeral, mixed with surprise at the turnout.
- Withdrawal after Charlie’s death.
- Bitterness toward Peter.
- Openness to Joan’s séance.
- Full entanglement in the fate the family cannot escape.
That progression is the film’s real plot. The paranormal occurrences are the punctuation.
Where Hereditary Stumbles
The second half moves faster than the first, and it loses some of the specificity that makes the opening hour so strong. Once the séance enters the story, the film leans harder on incident than on character.
That is a trade, not a failure. Aster conceived the film as two distinct halves. The second half has to deliver on the dread the first half builds. It mostly does.
What it does not do is keep Annie’s miniature work as central as it was. The dollhouse aesthetic is established early and then recedes. The film is more interesting when it remembers that Annie is an artist.
What Hereditary Leaves Behind
Hereditary is a horror film that understands grief is not a mood but a mechanism. Charlie’s death is not a shock for its own sake. It is the event that turns a strained family into a broken one, and the film is honest about how quickly that happens.
The performances carry it. Collette is the reason the film holds together across two very different halves. Wolff plays guilt without asking for sympathy. Shapiro makes an ambiguous character specific. Dowd makes patience feel like a threat.
The film’s reputation as one of the scariest movies ever made is earned, but it undersells what Aster is doing. The scares work because the family works. Take away the Grahams and the séance is just a scene.
Hereditary premiered at Sundance, opened wide in June 2018, and made $90 million on a $10 million budget. Those numbers matter for what got funded afterward. The film itself matters for a simpler reason: it treats a family’s collapse as the horror, and it never looks away.
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