Jason Crews is the owner and editor of INFRARED MAGAZINE and a Dallas–Fort Worth-based music journalist and concert photographer. Through INFRARED MAGAZINE and JASON CREWS PHOTOGRAPHY, he covers rock, metal, country, and live music with a focus on album reviews, artist features, concert coverage, and photography. His work is driven by a genuine passion for music and helping artists connect with new audiences through honest writing, strong visuals, and meaningful storytelling.
HEREDITARY
When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter's family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited.
Director: Ari Aster
Writers: Ari Aster
Stars: Alex Wolff, Gabriel Byrne, Toni Collette, Milly Shapiro, Christy Summerhays, Morgan Lund, Mallory Bechtel, Jake Brown, Harrison Nell, BriAnn Rachele, Heidi Méndez, Moises L. Tovar, Jarrod Phillips, Ann Dowd, Brock McKinney, Zachary Arthur, David Stanley, William "Bus" Riley, Austin R. Grant, Gabriel Monroe Eckert
Rating: 9.5 / 10 Stars
REVIEW – Some horror movies want to make you jump. Hereditary wants to convince you that the horrible thing has already happened, that everyone involved simply has not realized it yet, and that every attempt to escape is only another movement toward the conclusion waiting for them.
That distinction is what makes Ari Aster’s feature debut so devastating.
Hereditary is unquestionably a supernatural horror film, complete with occult mythology, possession, disturbing imagery, and several moments capable of permanently lodging themselves in your memory. But reducing the movie to those elements misses what makes it so effective. Before the supernatural machinery is fully revealed, Aster has already constructed something terrifying out of grief, resentment, guilt, family history, and the things people inherit from one another without ever choosing them.
This is a family tragedy in which horror does not invade the home.
The horror was already in the family.
Annie Graham, played with extraordinary intensity by Toni Collette, has just lost her mother Ellen when the film begins. Their relationship was complicated enough that Annie does not seem certain what she is supposed to feel. There is grief, but there is also resentment. There are buried histories, old accusations, psychological wounds, and uncomfortable memories that have never really healed.
Around her are husband Steve, played by Gabriel Byrne, teenage son Peter, played by Alex Wolff, and daughter Charlie, played by Milly Shapiro. They occupy the same house, but emotionally they often seem to be living in different worlds.
Aster understands that this distance is frightening before anything openly supernatural happens.
One of the first clues to what Hereditary is doing comes through Annie’s work. She creates miniature houses and painstaking dioramas, recreating pieces of her life in spaces small enough to control. The opening camera movement travels through her workshop and into a miniature version of Peter’s bedroom until the model becomes the real room.
It is an incredible opening because it quietly gives away the entire philosophy of the movie.
These people look like human beings making decisions.
Aster photographs them like figures somebody else has already positioned.
The miniature motif becomes one of Hereditary’s most important ideas. Annie recreates painful moments from her life as tiny scenes she can arrange, examine, and control. Outside her workshop, however, control is the one thing nobody in this family actually possesses.
The title itself becomes the warning.
What do we inherit?
Physical traits. Mental illness. Behavior. Trauma. Resentment. Secrets. Damage. Expectations. Family roles.
And in Hereditary, something much worse.
Pawel Pogorzelski’s cinematography reinforces that fatalistic feeling throughout the film. The Graham house frequently resembles another one of Annie’s models. Rooms are framed with unnatural precision. Wide compositions hold longer than expected. Darkness becomes somewhere the eye has to investigate rather than simply an empty part of the screen.
Aster repeatedly makes you search the frame.
That becomes increasingly dangerous.
There are horror filmmakers who announce danger with an edit, a musical sting, or sudden movement. Hereditary often does the opposite. Something may already be there. The camera does not necessarily point toward it. The movie trusts you to notice.
Once you start looking, every dark corner becomes suspicious.
That patience is essential to the film’s effectiveness.
Hereditary is a slow burn, but slow should never be mistaken for inactive. Aster is tightening the movie constantly. Conversations become confrontations. Grief becomes hostility. Silence becomes unbearable. A dinner table can become more frightening than another movie’s haunted basement because the emotional violence inside this family feels completely believable.
Collette is the center of that storm.
Her performance as Annie is one of the film’s greatest strengths because she refuses to make the character simple. Annie can be sympathetic, furious, wounded, resentful, frightened, manipulative, loving, and completely overwhelmed, sometimes within the same scene.
Collette gives Annie’s grief a physical quality. Her face appears capable of moving through several emotions before the people around her have processed the first one.
The film’s supernatural imagery is disturbing, but some of its most painful scenes require no supernatural effects whatsoever.
The confrontation between Annie and Peter at the dinner table is a perfect example. Years of anger finally break through under the disguise of an argument. A mother and son wound each other because neither knows what to do with the guilt between them. Peter wants his mother to stop blaming him. Annie appears to want something impossible: for reality itself to reverse.
Alex Wolff is equally important to making that relationship work.
Peter begins as a recognizable teenager and gradually becomes someone collapsing under guilt, fear, and forces he cannot understand. Wolff plays that deterioration without losing the vulnerable kid underneath it.
Gabriel Byrne’s Steve serves a very different purpose. He is rational, exhausted, skeptical, and increasingly convinced that Annie is psychologically unraveling. In another film, Steve might be the sensible character who finally recognizes the danger and leads everyone toward safety.
There is no safety here.
His rationality makes complete sense.
It is also completely useless.
That is one of Hereditary’s most disturbing ideas. Logic is not enough. Good intentions are not enough. Love is not enough. Recognizing that something is wrong does not mean you understand what is happening, and understanding what is happening does not necessarily mean you can stop it.
The film is built on the destruction of control.
Colin Stetson’s score pushes that feeling even further.
The music rarely functions as simple accompaniment. It seems to press against the film from underneath, creating the impression that something enormous is moving behind ordinary reality. Combined with the movie’s careful sound design, stretches of silence, faint noises, and Charlie’s unmistakable tongue click, the soundtrack gradually conditions the audience to fear sounds before understanding what they mean.
Eventually, a click is enough.
A shadow is enough.
An empty corner is enough.
The horror is not simply what appears.
It is the expectation that something has already entered the room.
For all its supernatural elements, Hereditary remains most effective because the Graham family feels damaged before any occult explanation becomes unavoidable.
The demon is frightening.
The emotional wounds are recognizable.
Parents can resent children.
Children can blame parents.
People can love one another and still inflict tremendous damage.
Grief can bring people together, but it can also expose every fracture already running through a family.
Hereditary takes those realities and asks what would happen if something evil knew exactly how to use them.
The answer is merciless.
The following section contains major spoilers, including character deaths and the ending of HEREDITARY.
⚠ SPOILER DISCUSSION — CLICK TO READ
Once the complete design becomes visible, Hereditary transforms from a story about a family encountering evil into something considerably crueler.
It becomes a story about a family that was cultivated for sacrifice.
Charlie’s death is the turning point, and the sequence remains one of the film’s most horrifying accomplishments because Aster initially presents it with the terrifying randomness of an accident.
Peter drives Charlie home from a party after she suffers an allergic reaction. She leans outside the car window struggling to breathe. Peter swerves.
The telephone pole does the rest.
Aster understands that the real horror comes after the impact.
Peter sits behind the wheel completely frozen.
He drives home.
He goes inside.
He lies down.
And eventually Annie discovers what happened.
The film does not give Peter a conventional breakdown immediately because he seems psychologically incapable of processing what he has done. That paralysis is far more disturbing than a louder reaction would have been.
Then Annie’s grief tears through the house.
Her response is one of the most brutal moments in the film because it feels almost too intimate to witness. The horror is no longer supernatural. It is the sound of a parent experiencing something that cannot be undone.
But the later revelation that the telephone pole bears the symbol associated with Paimon changes the entire meaning of Charlie’s death.
What looked like horrifying chance begins to look engineered.
Charlie was not simply in the wrong place.
The place was waiting for Charlie.
That distinction is central to Hereditary’s obsession with determinism.
The same is true of Joan, played with unsettling warmth by Ann Dowd. She appears to offer Annie exactly what grief makes her desperate enough to accept: the possibility that communication with the dead is real.
The séance is therefore one of the film’s cruelest traps.
Annie believes she is opening a door to Charlie.
She is opening the house.
Grief becomes the access point.
Annie’s desire to reconnect with her daughter, Peter’s guilt, Steve’s skepticism, and the family’s existing emotional fractures are all exploited. The supernatural horror succeeds because the psychological damage was already there.
That is why the occult mythology never feels detached from the family drama.
It feeds on it.
The mythology eventually identifies the force behind everything as King Paimon, whose followers are attempting to secure an appropriate male host.
Suddenly, Charlie’s place in the story changes.
So does Ellen’s.
The grandmother is no longer simply a difficult or secretive matriarch whose death activates buried family tensions. Her influence reaches backward through the family and forward into its destruction.
The maternal line becomes the mechanism through which the Graham family is sacrificed.
A family inheritance becomes a death sentence.
That makes Annie’s miniature work even more disturbing in retrospect.
She believes she is the one constructing models.
She is the model.
Her entire family has been living inside somebody else’s arrangement.
The pieces are positioned.
Charlie is removed.
Annie is broken.
Steve is eliminated.
Peter is psychologically destroyed until almost nothing remains capable of resisting what wants his body.
Everything that appeared chaotic begins to look structured.
That is the nightmare.
The final act abandons much of the restrained horror of the earlier film and becomes openly nightmarish.
Annie moves across ceilings.
Cult members emerge from the darkness surrounding the Graham home.
Bodies appear in places where bodies should never be.
Peter’s reality collapses completely.
Yet those images work because Aster spends so much time refusing to rush toward them.
When the movie finally unleashes itself, we understand that the nightmare is not beginning.
It is finishing.
The hidden cultists are especially effective.
Once you know to look for them, the darkness inside and around the house becomes populated. Human figures stand almost motionless in the shadows. Aster weaponizes the viewer’s own attention.
The longer you stare into the background, the worse the image becomes.
That is one of the movie’s best tricks.
It does not merely show you something frightening.
It teaches you how to frighten yourself.
The blue light works in a similar way, moving through the film like an indication that some unseen intelligence has already selected its next target.
Then there is Charlie’s tongue click.
At first it is simply an eccentric sound attached to her character.
After Charlie is gone, the sound becomes something else entirely.
A presence.
A warning.
A signature.
The movie teaches us its language gradually, and once we understand that language, tiny details become threatening.
By the final act, Hereditary barely needs conventional scares.
A sound is enough.
The final treehouse sequence is where the entire film locks into place.
Peter enters surrounded by the cult.
The horrific events that destroyed his family are no longer treated as disasters.
They are treated as completed steps.
Charlie’s identity, Paimon’s need for a male host, Ellen’s influence, Joan’s involvement, Annie’s destruction, Steve’s death, and Peter’s psychological collapse all converge in the coronation.
There is no heroic reversal.
No last-second rescue.
No ritual interruption.
No demon expelled from the house.
No suggestion that Peter can still reclaim himself.
The cult wins.
Paimon wins.
The Graham family existed inside a plan they could never see clearly enough to escape.
That makes the opening miniature shot devastating in retrospect.
Aster showed us the entire movie before the story had really begun.
The characters were already inside the dollhouse.
They just did not know who was arranging the pieces.
That construction is why Hereditary becomes even more disturbing when revisited.
Once you understand where everything is going, the background begins speaking.
Symbols matter.
Placement matters.
People seen earlier acquire new meaning.
The telephone pole changes.
Joan changes.
Charlie changes.
Even apparently incidental details start looking like pieces of an architecture that has surrounded the family the entire time.
The film becomes less about discovering the supernatural explanation and more about recognizing how little chance the Grahams ever had.
That is horrifying in a way a simple haunting could never be.
A ghost can sometimes be escaped.
A house can sometimes be abandoned.
A curse can sometimes be broken.
But how do you escape something built into your bloodline?
How do you outrun a family history that began before you were born?
How do you fight an enemy that has already anticipated every decision you will make?
That is the real terror behind the title.
Hereditary is about inheritance in its most monstrous form.
Annie inherits her mother’s damage.
Her children inherit Annie’s trauma.
The family inherits a plan none of them consented to.
And Peter ultimately inherits something that completely erases Peter.
The film’s final transformation is therefore not merely demonic possession.
It is the absolute victory of inheritance over identity.
There are small elements that keep Hereditary from being completely untouchable.
The final explanation of the occult mythology is considerably more explicit than much of the film’s earlier storytelling, and the transition from psychological uncertainty into fully defined supernatural mechanics can feel abrupt.
Its pacing is also intentionally demanding.
Aster spends a long time forcing us to remain inside grief, family arguments, silence, and emotional discomfort before revealing the full machinery behind the story.
But that patience is also inseparable from the film’s power.
The movie does not want to rush you toward the horror.
It wants to trap you inside the family first.
That is why everything later feels so invasive.
By the time the supernatural explanation becomes undeniable, we already know these people.
We know their resentments.
We know their guilt.
We know the ways they have hurt one another.
We know where they are vulnerable.
And so does whatever is manipulating them.
That is what makes Hereditary such a powerful piece of psychological horror.
The demon is not frightening simply because it is powerful.
It is frightening because it knows exactly where the family is already broken.
Ari Aster’s debut is a masterclass in slow-burn dread because it understands that fear is not always about wondering what might happen next.
Sometimes dread is the gradual realization that what happens next has already been decided.
Toni Collette gives a phenomenal central performance. Alex Wolff matches her with an increasingly desperate portrait of guilt and psychological destruction. Pawel Pogorzelski turns the Graham home into an enormous dollhouse. Colin Stetson makes the soundtrack feel like something breathing underneath the floorboards. And Aster connects grief, family inheritance, psychological trauma, and occult horror so tightly that removing any one of those elements would weaken everything around it.
There is no comforting victory waiting at the end.
No restored family.
No safe explanation.
No meaningful control regained.
Just the realization that these people may never have controlled the story we watched them suffer through.
Hereditary is disturbing when you first experience it.
It becomes even more disturbing when you realize everything was already in place.
INFRARED Rating: 9.5 / 10 Stars
Toni Collette in HEREDITARY
HEREDITARY | Official Trailer
