Perfect Things: Hereditary and The Joys of Emotional Terrorism
For movie fans, film buffs, horror fanatics, cinema obsessives, whatever it is you want to call us, if we're lucky, we come across a few experiences in the movie theater which stick with us for the rest of our lives. Those experiences can cover the range of human emotions and thinking, but what they have in common is the depth and intensity of the emotions they inspire.
Hereditary was one of those experiences. Based solely on the word of mouth and a short trailer I'd seen months before, I went with a friend and her husband to see the festival sensation all of the horror outlets and journalists were tripping over themselves to praise. Anyone who has followed film festival news of any variety, for any decent length of time knows how rarely hype of the kind Hereditary had pays off. I was expecting it to be good. I was expecting to enjoy it. I was expecting something much more traditional. I wasn't expecting it to not only live up to the hype, but to surpass it in almost every way.
What I got was two hours of among the emotionally wrenching, heartbreaking, anxiety inducing theater experiences I've ever had. That it was a film as dedicated to unnerving and discomfiting the audience through its depiction of the very real family disfunction, and individual emotional and psychological struggles, was not what I was ready for. Ari Aster's weaving of this emotionally bruising, psychologically punishing aspect of the story with the constant growing dread of more traditional horror in a brilliant way, melding a story of generational trauma, familial rifts and the supernatural had me transfixed. It pulled all this together, creating an experience which shifted from scene to scene with a building sense of horror and dread inextricable from some of the most difficult human emotions.
It spent it's first half hour or so being a film about grief, generational trauma and a family struggling to deal with these things, and in one harrowing scene that builds perfectly, it fully becomes a horror film, and it keeps all of those threads tightening through entirety of the film. It's one of the few times I've thought I might have a panic attack in a movie theater. When it reaches the finale, it crescendos in flashes of supernatural terror, made more horrifying by its all too human elements.
When I walked out, I was experiencing one of the most odd combinations of emotions a film has ever inspired. There was what can be described as something of an emotional hangover from the film itself, the residual sense of dread and emotional bruising. There was also a sense of unmitigated glee. The path to being a movie lover that goes through horror also travels through the inevitability of developing a love for independent movies. It means once in a while, you get to see a film from a new writer/director that screams to you. It doesn't just speak to you. It screams to you about the fact that you've just seen a work by someone who is a great talent in everything that phrase can mean. It means you know you're going to be getting more great films, and that you're going to get to look forward to those great films. Those months of waiting after it's been announced, the delicious expectation. It was clear Ari Aster was one of those talents.
Fortunately, I did go to see this with a friend and her husband, and we got some food afterwords, so that I didn't have to wander around the streets of the city attempting to shout the details of what I had just seen and what an incredible talent had created it, and how many more incredible films we were likely to be getting from them. Instead, we sat and talked and ate and parsed and obsessed, after a few minutes of trying to get ourselves back to some kind of even emotional keel. We sat and we talked, and I couldn't come up with much to say about it, because it was just overwhelming.
It's a thing I won't forget any time soon, maybe I'll never forget it. It was the swirl of emotions the film itself gave me, with that sense of beautiful, excited glee about discovering something great, by someone who was probably going to do a lot more great things in the future. Those are the kinds of things I go to the movies for. These are the reasons I fell in love with movies. This is the kind of thing great films do for us. It's all those things, all at the same time, in a way that's completely safe, and though what inspires them isn't real, the emotions themselves are, so it's safe. You can experience it all, feel it, be inspired by it, and set it aside when it's time, because you can always come back to it again, and you know it'll be waiting. The memory will be there, and it will mix in with the way you experience it next time, which is going to be different, because you can only ever see it for the first time once, and maybe, you're in a different place, a different person than when you saw it the first time, so what you see is different. How you feel is different, but it's still there with the memory of the first time, and over time, it all grows together. How you see it, how you understand it, it all grows and changes with you, even though the film itself stays the same. You know you can rely on it, and you know it will be the same, every time. Over time, it can reflect something of yourself back to you, because as you change, you remember all the times you've come back to it, and the people you've been when you've seen it, the ways you were different from the other times you've revisited it.