Hereditary

Hereditary opens with a family heading to a funeral for Annie's mother.  Annie (Toni Collette) gives a eulogy that outlines her very difficult relationship with her secretive mother.  It is a eulogy that makes you wonder why she even bothered.  Annie is an artist.  She makes miniature houses complete with furniture and people.  She has a bad habit of creating scenes from her life in miniature, which adds a creepy vibe to the movie and gives an insight to Annie's mental state.

 

Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is Annie's husband.  He's a solid fellow who is somehow coping with an increasingly unstable wife and grief-stricken family.  Peter (Alex Wolf) is the older child, a pot-smoking flake who is lost and directionless.  Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is the younger child and she is obviously not quite right.  She makes dark art, thinks nothing of dismembering a dead bird, and is hardest hit by her grandmother's death.

 

There are some scary moments but mostly it is predictable drivel.  The characters are too often blind to the obvious and march straight to their well-deserved doom.  There are parts that make no sense.  What hospital would send an unconscious youth home with his parents who then proceed to carry them between them like a sack of potatoes?  Why is Peter constantly on his cell phone early in the movie but, when things go sideways, he has no phone?  All cell phones just vanish in the later half of the film because that would be too easy.  The ending is reminiscent of The Witch, where the forces of evil triumph and the last member of the family numbly accepts it.  And that is weird too.  If the end was the goal, some of the scares and incidents of the middle become counter-productive.

Skip this one.