7.9 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
When a matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter's family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry.
Starring: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Mallory Bechtel, Ann DowdHorror | 100% |
Mystery | 34% |
Supernatural | 30% |
Psychological thriller | 29% |
Drama | 6% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.00:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.00:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, Spanish
Blu-ray Disc
Two-disc set (1 BD, 1 DVD)
Digital copy
DVD copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region A (locked)
Movie | 3.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Hereditary's closing credits mention that it was shot in Utah, and according to online data at such sites as IMDb (and others), that locale is
further specified as being in and around Salt Lake City. Though it's really not germane to the story the film tells, the Utah location perhaps
"perked up" my personal ears for a couple of reasons. Having been born and raised in Salt Lake City, and probably
due to the fact that I was a non-LDS being reared in a culture that was decidedly very Mormon back in those days (I've heard from
friends, including LDS friends, that it's considerably more ecumenical slash cosmopolitan nowadays), I found it kind of funny
that a film about cults and demonic possession should have been filmed in a region renowned for hosting a religion that is both perceived as being
vice free (in terms of supposed "sins" like smoking and/or drinking, not to mention devil worship), but that I've nonetheless actually heard other
people claim is a cult itself (I'm not condoning such an analysis, merely reporting it). Kind of weirdly, I just stumbled upon this kind of fascinating tidbit from the Salt Lake area’s relatively recent past, which would
suggest that despite its often squeaky clean image, there’s a roiling substratum of supposedly “nefarious” activity that has occurred in or near the
valley
that Brigham Young famously described as “the place” his pilgrims had been searching for in their trek across the American wilderness, a place
that
evidently has included all kinds of "cults" over the years.
There was
a funny old Johnny Carson joke from long ago where he described flying into the Salt Lake airport and the stewardess announcing, “We’re about to
arrive in Salt Lake City, please set your watches back twenty years,” but Hereditary may subliminally suggest that there’s a somewhat
“longer” timeline suffusing the region, one that reaches back into the dim mists of creation when certain angels decided they knew best and all hell
literally broke loose. Hereditary is an unabashedly disturbing film, and while it ultimately gets to some rather grotesque depictions (more
about which a bit later in this review), it’s interesting to contrast this film’s approach with another outing I just reviewed, the Stephen Biro opus The Song of Solomon. The Song of
Solomon is another film about
possession which (as I mentioned in our The Song of
Solomon Blu-ray review) proffers a pull quote on its cover touting it as “better than The Exorcist” (as can be seen in the key art above this review, the Friedkin film is also cited in a pull quote on this
release as well). The Song of Solomon makes no cinematic bones about the presence of evil taking over the
mind, soul and body of a young woman named Mary, and the bulk of that film deals with increasingly gory aspects of both possession and
exorcism, with the film beginning with an extremely graphic sequence documenting the suicide of Mary's father courtesy of a knife he wields.
Hereditary on the other hand manages to develop an unabashedly spooky mood more out of hints than outright displays for at least the
first half hour or so, as it documents the emotional roller coaster an artist named Annie Graham (an impressive Toni Collette) experiences
after first the death of her perhaps mentally ill mother and then somewhat later another tragic demise that tips Annie and her family into a fraught
dynamic where the “veil” between reality and perhaps imagined fears is, to purloin a phrase also from long ago, rent asunder.
Hereditary is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.00:1. The IMDb lists a variety of Arri models as having digitally captured the imagery, which was then finished at a 2K DI. The film is perhaps unavoidably highly stylized, with a number of interior shots bathed in a kind of brownish-yellow hue, and with other, near hallucinatory, moments similarly swathed in cooler blue tones. Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski utilize a lot of extreme close-ups, something that helps maintain very good to excellent levels of fine detail despite the at times rather aggressive grading choices. Those grading choices probably only make the more natural looking moments pop all the more vividly, and a few selected outdoor scenes offer a warmly suffused palette that features nice depth of field while also supporting commendable general detail levels. There are a couple of moments of very slight banding in evidence (the most notable one for me was the harrowing scene with Peter and Charlie in the car, where headlights aimed directly at the camera in a supposedly foggy environment show clear gradation lines), but otherwise this is solid looking transfer that should please the film's fans.
Hereditary features an ominous sounding DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 that traffics in some fairly hoary sound design clichés, but which still delivers some admirable atmosphere. The film's moody score is often mixed with washes of low frequency sound, both of which waft through the surround channels in an almost menacing fashion, and which together add a bit of unease to seemingly "innocent" scenes like some views of Annie's miniature work. The "haunting" scenes provide little jolts of sonic energy in discrete channels, but a lot of Hereditary is fairly tamped down, sound design wise, with an emphasis on front and center dialogue. All elements are delivered with excellent fidelity and no problems whatsoever.
I'm not completely sure Hereditary is quite the modern classic some others seem to have felt it is, but the film has an undeniably effective mood which helps it elide some of its lack of development and in fact logic. Collette is excellent in a role that might have devolved into needless histrionics with a less nuanced performer, and the supporting cast, notably Wolff as son Peter, is also excellent. Technical merits are solid, and Hereditary comes Recommended.
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