Ari Aster's directorial debut. Toni Collette's most-discussed dramatic lead, and a horror film built on family grief rather than on supernatural mechanics.
Utah. Annie Graham, a miniaturist artist, is mourning the death of her mother Ellen, with whom she had a difficult relationship. Annie lives with her husband Steve, son Peter, and 13-year-old daughter Charlie. Charlie is the daughter Ellen seemed to favour; the relationship is left deliberately unsettling. Several weeks after Ellen's funeral, Annie sends Peter to a party with Charlie. Peter abandons Charlie at the party; she has an allergic reaction to walnuts in the chocolate cake she was given; Peter drives her home in panic and a car accident decapitates her.
The film tracks the family through the months after Charlie's death. Annie joins a grief-support group; she meets Joan, a fellow survivor whose son also died. Annie's relationship with Peter — already strained — deteriorates further. The film's final act reveals that Ellen had been involved with a cult that had selected Charlie as the vessel for the demon Paimon; the death is the cult's mechanism for transferring Paimon into Peter. The film closes with the surviving family members dead or transformed and the cult conducting its coronation ritual in the family's treehouse.
Hereditary is the most-respected horror debut of the 2010s, partly because of what it refuses to do. The film does not announce itself as horror in the first act; the supernatural elements are minimal and ambiguous. The first hour is, structurally, a family drama about the aftermath of two specific deaths — Annie's mother Ellen and Annie's daughter Charlie. The supernatural mechanics emerge only in the third act.
What this gives the film is dramatic substance that conventional horror does not always carry. The Graham family's grief is treated with the seriousness conventional family drama would treat it; the deaths register as actual losses rather than as plot mechanics; the family's deterioration is dramatically plausible before any supernatural framework is required. The film's defenders argue this is the source of its specific power — the horror lands because the family has been given real weight beforehand.
Toni Collette's Annie is, by general critical consensus, the work of her career. The performance is the film's structural foundation; almost every emotional beat is delivered through Collette's specific physical and verbal register. The most-discussed single sequence is the dinner-table scene in which Annie, after Charlie's death, finally tells Peter exactly what she has held in across the months of his suppression. The monologue runs roughly three minutes. Collette's specific physical comportment across the scene — the wide-eyed approach to dissociation, the swallowed shout, the final breakdown into open grief — is among the most-discussed acting work of the 2010s.
Collette was, by 2018, a respected character actress with significant supporting roles (Muriel's Wedding 1994, The Sixth Sense 1999, Little Miss Sunshine 2006). Hereditary established her as a major lead capable of carrying difficult dramatic material at the level of any working contemporary American film actor. The Academy's failure to nominate her for Best Actress was, in 2019, widely considered one of the most-debated Oscar omissions of recent years.
Ari Aster directed Hereditary as his feature debut. The film's visual style — wide static frames that allow the audience to scan the entire space for unsettling elements, deliberate use of miniature-craft work in the production design (Annie's profession as a miniaturist is structurally important), restrained colour grading that emphasises greys and pale yellows — established Aster as one of the most-distinctive visual filmmakers of his generation.
Aster's subsequent work (Midsommar 2019, Beau Is Afraid 2023, the upcoming Eddington 2025) has extended the approach in various directions. Hereditary remains, by general critical consensus, his most-controlled film. The debut feature's structural discipline has not always been matched by his later work — the longer running times of Midsommar (148 minutes) and Beau Is Afraid (179 minutes) have been argued about as either ambitious or self-indulgent extensions of the Hereditary register.