Hereditary
Hail Paimon. Go ahead, chase me, I’ll run away to the attic.
What the fuck is that ending? It’s a pretty powerful hardcore horror film until then, packing the psychological horror first, to hit you with the visually gruesome stuff in the end, after softening you up, but that ending scene is just a big acid trip.
It manages this while being very artsy-fartsy and self-referential: the protagonist does miniatures of scenes of the film itself, all Synecdoche, New York is where they will be shown.
And by hardcore, I mean it. Rushing your differently abled little sister to the hospital, pining for a Shkreli EpiPen and ending up beheading her on a post is the trigger for the rest of the plot, but it’s not even the climax.
It’s a bleak film, featuring multiple funerals, grief support groups, so you start to feel good, knowing that redemption awaits at the end, but no siree, you don’t deserve good feelings. Just grief and suffering, relentless.
On the other hand, it’s not one note like a Rob Zombie film, there’s always a hint of hope, a glimmer of resolution, quickly snatched away into the hole. If a Rob Zombie is akin to getting kicked in the stomach over and over again, this is more like a Guantanamo “enhanced interrogation”, there’s method to the madness. Evil methods, but it’s not random.
It seems A24 and Blumhouse are competing for trying to do the most effective horror film with lower budget. The budget is not too high here, but it is spent on the right places. The goofier effects are saved for last, after your resolve has been weakened.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.