Lemme preface by saying you know I’m picky about horror, yeah? At least when it comes to straight up horror, I’m very specific about what I’m into. Camp, gore, suspense, those are all well and good. But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I don’t typically scare easily, and I need more from a movie than just trying to scare me. I bring this up because I know that Hereditary is getting a lot of love. I just didn’t care for it much.
Hereditary starts off as more of a family drama, which is an angle I was all about. Toni Collette is having trouble keeping herself and her family together after her mother dies. I don’t know how detailed I can get without spoiling, but let’s just say it’s not going well. In fact, it’s kinda disturbing in how badly it’s going.
For me, I felt like it dragged a bit too much in getting going. Again, I like the idea of this basically being a family drama that just happens to have horror elements, but it was too drawn out for me. Once we did start to get into full on freak out, it felt like every other occult horror ever. They’ve never scared me before, and they didn’t scare me now.
Now doing some homework later, I found out that a lot of it could be interpreted as a take on mental illness. I kinda see it in retrospect, but it was nowhere near apparent to me when watching. I feel like if I had connected better to that, I would have enjoyed the film more. Those are the types of layers I like to see. But if I hafta learn about that later instead of picking up on it as I’m watching, that just doesn’t work for me. Bummer.
Hereditary – \m/ \m/ \n