For the week of September 3rd, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing the psychological chiller Hereditary to Blu-ray. For about an hour, I thought the film might be a new horror masterpiece. Writer-director Ari Aster has created something more in line with Jack Clayton's The Innocents in terms of how it slowly ratchets up the tension to an unbearable pitch while never (and this is the most important part) letting it dissipate or go slack. And like that 1961 classic, Hereditary gains power through its focus on psychological realism. This film is very much in conversation with the ways that, try as we might, we cannot escape the worst parts of our familial bloodlines. You watch Toni Collette (in a fearless performance that should merit Oscar attention) crumble under the psychic damage her deceased mother passed along to her only to then inflict the exact same trauma (and worse!) to her own family (Gabriel Byrne, Milly Shapiro, and a wrenching Alex Wolff), and you realize we could be watching a film about inheriting addictive personality issues or bipolar disorders. That psychological lineage is, on its own, frightening beyond compare; Hereditary's genre trappings are almost incidental. And then Hereditary goes off the rails, and not in a good way. What I love about that first hour is that, for all its concessions to horror fans, the nature of the evil remains opaque, elusive. We're pretty sure something supernatural is operating just off camera, but we also can't trust anything from Collette's perspective. The most frightening scene in the film isn't either of the two séances or the horrifying car accident that kicks off the second act: it's a dream sequence where Collette tells Wolff she never wanted a son and then immediately tries to take it back, her hands futilely grabbing at the words just as they leave her mouth. And that not-knowing is so rich in terms of keeping us off-balance that it's a major deflation when Collette ends up finding a Special Book that outlines pretty much everything going on behind the scenes. But more importantly, it resolves all that uncertainty into something far more tangible and - dare I say? - stupid. No longer are we left worrying about these characters' fraught psyches; nope, we're in comfortable territory that unfolds like an mélange of The Babadook and Rosemary's Baby. Aster still maintains the same rigorous formal control, and he pulls off a shot that offers a riveting time-delayed scare should you see the film in the theaters (he conditions us to scan the edges of the frame and then uses that practice to gut us), but nothing that happens after minute ninety or so surprises us.
Also from Lionsgate comes the dark character study Beast. About two-thirds of the way through director Michael Pearce's debut feature, his brooding heroine Moll (Jessie Buckley) breaks. She's certainly had call to before; every day, she's endured daily humiliations from a passive-aggressive mother (a one-note Geraldine James) that constantly reminds Moll of her own violent past. Moll's own birthday gets overshadowed when her younger sister announces she's pregnant. Even after Moll catches the attentions of a sexy poacher (Johnny Flynn), she's got to contend with the very definite possibility that he might be raping and butchering a series of young girls around their small UK island (Jersey, looking alternatively mystical and miserable). Part of the beauty of what Buckley does is how she shoulders all this pain. She turns it into a physical element, weighing her down in every scene. As such, you can't blame Moll for snapping, breaking down into feral shrieks at the funeral of the latest victim. But Buckley makes the moment so much more uncomfortable than it might be otherwise. All that repression, all that pain: it just erupts out of her. In that moment, we're as shocked as anyone on camera. It's the crescendo to a consistently breathtaking performance - Buckley proves just as preternaturally in control when she's flailing as when she's holding everything back. And if Beast were better, I could see it launching Buckley to the forefront of screen actors her age. She's that good. But the movie can't quite match her intensity. Pearce creates a mise en scęne that's part Andrea Arnold, part Jeremy Saulnier, thanks, in part, to the widescreen compositions of DP Benjamin Kracun - and it certainly deserves credit for trying to marrying a kind of impressionistic kitchen-sink drama with a serial-killer thriller. However, Pearce just isn't as good a writer as he is a director. As good as Buckley is, Pearce's script traffics too readily in pat psychology. She's less a person than a collection of tics, be they her troubled past or her fraught relationship with her mother. We've seen this material before, so Beast can't cut it as a character study. As a thriller, it's worse. Late in the game, you realize how hard Pearce is using his aesthetic skills to patch over gaps in the procedural aspect. Without spoiling too much, we've got a mystery with only two possible suspects, so flip a coin, and you're likely to guess right. To Beast's credit, Pearce ends on an unforgettable image. Once again, it's all Buckley, who exits the movie staring down the camera barrel, like she's daring a better filmmaker to make better use of her. Here's hoping someone takes that challenge.
For most of its runtime, STX and Universal Studios Home Entertainment's Adrift is the best kind of surprise. Ignore the film's drippy, maudlin trailers - the studio tried to sell Adrift as a crossbreed of All Is Lost and The Notebook. Yes, we are dealing with two young lovers (Shailene Woodley and Sam Clafin, playing the real-life sailors Tami Oldham Ashcraft and Richard Sharp, respectively) trying to brave the elements while stranded in the open ocean, but this is a far tougher, more muscular adventure than you might be expecting. At its best moments, director Baltasar Kormákur presents Adrift as a relentless series of catastrophes. Early on, Sharp suffers a catastrophic injury, which Ashcraft has to triage while also trying to fix their badly damaged boat. And deal with the perils of dehydration and starvation. And gird herself against the near-constant onslaught of the sea, which DP Robert Richardson (of The Hateful Eight and Shutter Island) conveys through terrifying details: wide expanses of nothing, unpredictable waves, and the uncertainty of what's below the water line. The film has more in common with Kormákur's underrated 2015 docudrama Everest in how pitiless it makes nature seem. Normally, I'd grow impatient with the periodic flashbacks that spirit us from the boat to when Clafin and Woodley were falling in love, but at least on my first viewing, I appreciate the relief from the hell on water. Best of all is Woodley. She catches a lot of flak for her personal eccentricities, but she's always been a performer of great subtlety and nuance, and she excels at handling vivid physical details, in which Adrift never stops immersing her. However, much as I'd like to brand Adrift a minor classic, I can't. It stumbles - and badly - in its last act, building to a third-act twist, believe it or not, that feels more appropriate for a genre story than a "Based on a True Story" such as this. Not only have you seen this twist before, but it also feels ghoulish, considering how it revises the actual experiences of Ashcraft and Sharp for more sensational ends. Still, so much of what precedes this beat is fiendishly effective that I'm willing to give Adrift a pass regardless. Just stick to the record next time, okay?
How has it been twenty-five years since the initial release of Walt Disney Home Entertainment's Hocus Pocus? (Don't ask - it's rhetorical.) I confess that I'd never seen the film until recently - back in 1993, the film's mix of slapstick and Halloween scare seemed less refined than say, Tim Burton and Henry Selick's great The Nightmare Before Christmas - but this delay allowed me to view Hocus Pocus from a more objective perspective. A lot of the affection for it does seem to stem from nostalgia alone. Most of the people I know who adore the film (and they are legion) freely admit it's because this was the first horror-adjacent picture they saw when they were seven or eight. Nothing wrong with that, but as a movie itself, Hocus Pocus feels like a lot of early '90s Disney programmers that would substitute loud and frenetic in place of anything more substantive (see also: Honey, I Blew Up the Kid and Hocus Pocus director Kenny Ortega's musical Newsies). It's a shtick-y piece of work, overstuffed with talking cats and lovesick zombies and hacky cameos from Garry and Penny Marshall and a full-tilt Bette Midler performance (as Winnie Sanderson, the leader of a trio of witches terrorizing Salem, Massachusetts), and it does wear you out over the course of its comparatively slim ninety-six minutes. That said, I get why Hocus Pocus has endured as a cult favorite, and it isn't on nostalgia alone. Ortega gets a lot of mileage from the Halloween setting. The Salem (and doubled studio locations) environs have an exaggerated, funhouse appeal. In a lot of ways, this movie functions as a better Haunted Mansion movie than the real thing. He's also good with his cast of child actors. In particular, then-eight-year-old Thora Birch steals pretty much every scene she's in. And though I might find Midler more than a little extra, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker do wonderful work as Midler's witchy confederates - Najimy creates a host of weirdo facial and vocal affectations that practically turn her into a live-action Ub Iwerks character. There's a lot to enjoy here, even if I probably should have seen it twenty-five years ago.