Hereditary

I provide this movie review as a PUBLIC SERVICE to all of you looking to avoid a terrible movie.  Do not listen to any of the critics out there who have annnoited this movie as the next “Get Out.”   I loved “Get Out,” but I can not say the same for this mess!  Do  not read any further if you plan on seeing this movie, despite all of my warnings, as there are a few spoilers mixed in.  Let me start out be saying that ‘Hereditary’ starts out promisingly.  Toni Collette is a superb actress and she does give a fine, creepy performance as a distraught artist mom (seems to be her main strength, crazy and distraught), grieving over her own mother’s death.   Her movie daughter, Charlie, and son, Peter, have issues of their own. Alex Wolff stumbles through his slacker stoner role with only minimal pathos; but Milly Shapiro is one of the creepiest kids I have seen in a movie in ages.  However, she is not really in the movie for very long, the major presence she seems to have in the trailers is quite misleading.  If the movie had focused  on her character, I think I would have enjoyed it much more, but her death is a key point in the developing ‘plot.’ The first half of the movie did contain genuine suspense; but also some gross-out scenes, especially involving a character’s pretty improbable decapitation.  Obviously, horror movies have characters doing stupid things, like going into a dark, creepy basement late at night, but this movie had so many such plot devices that it became ludicrous. Add in plot holes that you could drive a truck through and it became ridiculous – several people in the audience laughed at several points at the improbabilities.  SPOILER ALERT: Someone in the movie gets into a car accident in which their sibling passenger is gruesomely killed (see above).  Instead of calling the police, he drives home (with the dead body in the car) and goes to sleep!  When the mother discovers the dead body the next morning; after the screaming, the movie cuts right to a funeral. What?  No police, no counseling, a  disengaged husband and father (Gabriel Byrne sleepwalking through a mailed-in performance) does nothing.  The kid just goes back to school.  Later, as the “plot” develops, he brutally bangs his face into his desk in front of the shocked and strangely inactive class and teacher, apparently breaking his nose, and his parents calmly take him home and put him to bed?  Really?  No hospital or mental health evaluation?  A strangely chirpy woman who meets the mom at a group for those who grieve, goes the extra mile in pursuing the mom. Why? You should begin guessing by now.  She teaches the mother how to conduct a seance that brings people back from the dead after only one brief lesson?  The increasingly psychotic mom  then talks the disengaged husband and the increasingly jittery and crazed teenage son into a ridiculous seance of her own. It rapidly gets worse and more goofy.  I’m sure we were supposed to be grossed out and scared when one of the main characters cuts off her own head, but by this point, it was just all so silly!  If you want to see half of a good movie, and watch an ending that is so ludicrious you contemplate asking for your money back, then by all means go see this movie.  I do have one question though for Gabriel Byrne,”What kind of dirt does the dirctor have on you?” This one makes ‘Mother’ look great.