Movie Review Hereditary

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2018 - Spoiler alerts Hyped as the scariest thing since The Exorcist, I found this movie utterly inchorant. Not scary at all. Toni Collette's performance, touted for Oscars is impressive but it just adds layer on layer of extreme emoting to the point where it gets tedious. Films about losing grip on reality fall into danger of getting too surreal, as does this at times. The problem is its shifting points of view, changing our thoughts on who the protagonist is and an ending that feels picked out of a bag of random options. The best villain is dead before the credits start, the grandmother, and there is a genuine sense of malevolence about her. The daughter Charlie is also impressive and creepy, but after she is unexpectedly wiped out, Alex is actually boring and very monotone in everything he does. He's not even evil, just a bit selfish and then scared. He takes drugs - big deal. Charlie was decapitating pigeons. Why does the cult suddenly worship the squarest teenager going? The seances make no sense. Ann Dowd's Joan has seen one and invites annie to attend the next but then just recreates the event herself which works. Annie goes from sceptical, checking the table for wires, as does her husband and Alex when Annie recreates the same scene with equal success (or failure in that such damage is caused). It's like seeing Sooty go izzy whizzy lets get busy and then performing the same magic for real yourself on the first attempt. The burning of the husband (Gabriele Byrne burns) is also nonsensical. Annie catches fire trying to burn the evil book, so she stops but then she burns it again but her husband burns instead. Then the whole thing literally goes Treehouse Of Terror without Bart Simpson as Charlie is declared as a demon incarnate by the cult but he doesn't react to it with either 'you're all mad' or 'okay it's a fair cop, let's take over the World'. He just stands there like a plank as we sense the whole thing is a play with the doll's house which is barely a hop skip and jump-scare from it was all a dream. I hated this. Much of the movie is derivative. The seance gone wrong - Stir Of Echoes. A whole cult seeing a family member as the chosen one - Rosemary's Baby. The book of evil that defies efforts to destroy it - The Evil Dead. etc. My problem with Inheritance is that it can't decide what direction it is going At first it plays on ambiguity. The daughter may be acting from distress relating to her Gran's death, naturally psychotic, or possessed. Her being taken out of the plot puts the son in the spotlight instead but we just have nothing on him to work with. There is way too much forshadowing. The daughter is repeatedly warned about her nut allergy so it hardly comes as a surprise when she eats nuts and her throat swells up, (even though this is treated as supernatural later). Her decapitation of the birds forshadows a more significant head loss later. The mother's sleepwalking and attempt to cover her family in flammable liquid before her failed (described but unseen) attempt to burn them all forshadows the burning of Gabrial Byrne.... The time shifts of the film are also problematic. It isn't always clear that days, weeks and months have passed between some scenes. It all unfolds way too quickly Arthur Chappell