Review: 'Hereditary' and the Art of Tension

WARNING: This review contains spoilers.

Since Hereditary hit theaters on June 8, it's all my horror buddies and I have been able to talk about. All in all, I've seen it three times and each one has been a completely different experience, but one thing remains the same, the queasy pit in my stomach as Annie (Toni Colette) stares into the darkness at her mother's apparition.

Obviously, this isn't the scariest moment in the movie, but it does perfectly showcase what I believe has made this movie so successful. Tension.

Tension in the last several years of horror has been a bit of a Goldilocks dilemma. Try to repeatedly frighten your audience with jump-scares and high pitched violins (ahem...Insidious...cough cough) and you end up with a movie that while it might be terrifying the first time around, does not have a lot of replay-ability. On the other hand, some movies drag the obvious plot exposition on for far too long, lore-building for so long that you forget you're supposed to be scared.

In short, it's a hard line to toe, but I believe that Hereditary spoon-feeds you just enough creepiness and mystery to keep you entranced. Everything in film is a choice. If you're seeing something in a shot, it's because somebody wants you to see it. So by setting up these small, subtle clues, like the cultists' symbol on the electrical pole or Anne talking about Joan's (Ann Dowd) welcome mat, you're concocting a sense of mystery that will leave your audience with a big "Ah Ha!" moment by the end of the film.

Similarly, this is how the tension is structured within the film. Small disturbing bits, carefully broken up within the first act, meant to put you on edge i.e. Charlie's clicking noise, Anne revealing her family's checkered past at the support group, and the obvious distance between Annie and Peter. All of this tells us that there is fundamentally something wrong in this family. This is confirmed to us when after Charlie ingests peanuts and is accidentally killed by her brother rushing to get her to the hospital, and instead of calling for help he instead goes home to hide in his bedroom and wait for someone to find the body.

In the second act, momentum is building as the family is splintered further by Charlie's untimely and gruesome death. The stages of grief push the story forward here as Anne struggles to deal with her daughter's death, and the previous tension between her and Peter is taken to a whole new level. Supernaturally speaking, this is also the point where things begin to ramp up, such as the seance at Joan's house and the nightmares Peter and Anne are experiencing.

The beauty of this movie, as with the other horror movies Hereditary is being compared to such as The Exorcist or The Shining, is that the first two acts work like gasoline being poured on to a barrel of dynamite. Putting you on the edge of your seat in preparation for the explosion of horror at the end of the movie.

If you're like me and you're a screenwriter or interested in becoming a screenwriter, then I feel like the lesson here is take your time. A lot of people are ready to jump right into the action and have their monster/spiritual/entity/crazed lunatic kill all of the crazy sex-having teenagers, but the reason Hereditary works so well is because you are invested in the relationships between the characters first and foremost. It utilizes the dynamics of their relationships to make the audience uncomfortable and raise the stakes of the story.

Overall, I very much enjoyed Hereditary and if you ignored the spoiler warning and read all of the way through this anyways, I bet you'll probably enjoy it too. It is a truly unsettling but brilliant movie with a fascinating take on a family learning to deal with the death of a loved one.