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Hereditary



The death of mother starts a chain reaction which leads a woman to spiral out of control and effect her whole family in unexpected ways.

My summary doesn't make it out to be a horror movie but it is. I liked the unsettling tone of the movie.By this point I am able to pick up on the directorial choices in this genre. The tone of a movie is essential. Certain examples of tone are the poor neighborhood of Detroit in don't breathe or the 1980's feel to Detroit in IT follows or the period feel to conjuring or the ancient look of the witch. The tone takes you into the lives of the characters. The second trope I noticed in the movie and that is the disturbing third act. More specifically the second part of third act. So it is the part leading up to the climax. The third trope is the psychological degradation of characters.The delusions and reality converging to make characters not trust what they see.

All these are in this movie.This is better than most movies which belong in this genre. The atmospheric nature is much more subtle as opposed to lot of other films. The surroundings blend into the background without asking for attention. The creep factor picks up towards the end and its more unsettling than anything.

Spoilers

The story starts with the funeral of an old woman, the mother of our main female character(x) who has been secretive her whole life.From X we learn that she is extremely manipulative and taken a liking to her grand daughter from infancy. X decides to not have a son because she didn't want a son in the house for her own sanity but nonetheless she has a son. The whole family of X has some kind of mental diseases that eventually lead to their demise. Even X survived some sort of mental disease. The daughter raised by dead woman has some kind of syndrome to begin with. I do think there is certain amount of make up to her. All those made her pretty weird to begin with. But as we go along we realize that she isn't a harm to anyone in the family but she just is not normal. All that comes to an end during an auto accident that decapitates the girl. This accelerates the plot in unexpected ways. Firstly this further breaks down X who is already distraught at her mother's death. Then she confides in a fellow support group member. The support group member reveals her a method on how to speak with dead people and she in turn uses it to speak with her daughter and that sort of invites her spirit into the house. From then on the reveals keep hitting. Firstly in an earlier scene it is revealed the death of brother of X is because of an apparent suicide he committed after complaining that their mother tried to put in bodies inside him. X's father killed himself through starvation. So basically everyone around the dead grandmother is killed one after another. The reveal is, she is part of a coven. The coven's mission is to find a human host especially male to be possessed by some hell god. When the old woman was able bodied, she tried doing that to her son but he killed himself. So she put it in her grand daughter. I think the plan is to wait till the boy is able bodied and then place the hell god spirit in them. Since the grand mother dies before that and she knew she didn't have very many days she placed the spirit in the grand daughter, so she could somehow transfer it to the son. But her decapitation sort of accelerates the process as the host is dead and they need at-least the spirit of the host to be invited back into the house so it could transfer spirit of hell god into the son. So it all culminates in a horrifying finale where in the son becomes possessed by spirit of king of hell. And also as part of this coven's ritual they needed the decapitated dead body of the old woman and its in the house attic for a while. All the moving parts are different pieces of puzzle needed for the ritual to be complete.In the end, unbeknownst to X her mother makes her part of the ritual because they are part of same hereditary. So she is a unwitting member of the ritual.But when the son kills himself by jumping through the window of the attic, his body becomes a perfect vessel for hell god to possess and is crowned as their king.

This has disturbing imagery and believably troubled performances.The switcheroo of making the daughter look creepy but her not being the antagonist is very smart. She acted like a disturbed child raised by a witch but at no point does she act more than just like a child. There is also this sense of inevitability and doom looming over the family wherever the family member is. Its almost like a families fate is fixed.like watching a family leading upto the day all of them gets massacred.That's the best part of it.