Happy 31 days of Halloween!
This year, we’re celebrating with a different movie pick each day that made us audibly gasp, “WHAT THE FUCK?!“
Our 19th film pick is Hereditary. It was quite the movie experience for me, and I have a personal story about why this one hit me hard. I’ll get to that shortly, but let’s first recap the highlights.
Hereditary is written and directed by Ari Aster. The Grahams are grieving the loss of the family’s matriarch and begin experiencing increasingly terrifying events. Grandma was private and eccentric, to say the least, and Annie (Toni Collette) is left to pick up the pieces. Annie is mom to two teenagers (Alex Wolff and Milly Shapiro), and the whole family is depressingly emotionally distant. I felt a very personal connection to the mother, Annie. Her strained relationship with her mother mimicked my own with my late mother. The story hooked me. But that’s where the similarities end because this movie gets spooky really quick. Thank god for Ari Aster’s loopy storytelling to take me out of that into another depressing and shocking world.
Oh yeah, did I tell you I’m a horrible mom, too? Here’s the lousy parenting part. I actually took my teenager with me on their birthday to see Hereditary. That’s right. Let’s not just traumatize my soul but screw up my kid’s, too. They wanted to go to a movie with me, and I let them pick. I don’t look up movies beforehand because I like being surprised and having no chance of spoilers. I didn’t know what to expect, and I absolutely adore Toni Collette. So off we went to celebrate the birthday with this terribly dark film.
I was not prepared for this level of trauma, and that whole anaphylactic shock, speeding car accident, took us out! That was only the beginning of the what the fuckery. We cried and held each other and laughed that awkward laugh you do when you realize you’re in over your head. We’ve watched it many more times since, and it’s one of our favorites now, but that first viewing was probably a mistake. Probably. Maybe.
