Hereditary (2018)
Directed by Ari Aster
Written by Ari Aster
The Best Sequence in Hereditary
The big death scene in Hereditary is the best scene in any movie in 2018. This article is about to go into great detail about this scene so if you have not seen Hereditary, which I feel is the best movie of 2018, you should stop reading after this introductory paragraph and come back after you have watched Ari Aster’s remarkable, debut masterpiece. This article will openly reveal a pivotal and shocking death of one of the main characters in Hereditary.
A primer: Hereditary stars Toni Collette as Annie, an artist and stay at home mother. Annie crafts elaborate models of daily scenes from her home life, from the seemingly mundane, to the funeral of her recently deceased mother. Annie’s mother has recently died as the story begins but Annie is strangely lacking in profound emotion. Annie’s husband, Steve (Gabriel Byrne), is dutiful and supportive. While Annie and Steve’s son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is a typically aloof and above it all teenager.
Daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), however, appears to take her grandmother’s passing far harder than anyone else. Her emotion is not outward, per se, Charlie is a special needs child though the film is vague on her exact condition. Charlie expresses her grief in odd behaviors that include a disturbing fascination with a dead bird which she finds at school and brings home. What she does with the bird from there you can discover in the film. It’s a terrifying visual detail that pays off in terrific horror.
Our scene is set when Peter wants to go to a party and his mother instructs him to take Charlie to the party with him. While Peter is off getting high at the party, Charlie has a piece of cake, unaware that the cake has nuts and she has an allergic reaction. As a paranoid and terrified Peter rushes Charlie to the hospital, Charlie struggles to breath and eventually leans her head out of the car window to get more air.
An out of control Peter nearly crashes the car into a telephone pole but as he swerves to miss it, Charlie’s head strikes the pole and is taken completely off. Director Ari Aster never shows us what happened to Charlie. There is no outward gore in the scene. Instead, in a masterful, and far more terrifying move, Aster keeps the camera on Peter as the tragedy that has just taken place slowly dawns on him.
A shocked Peter stays in the car, afraid to look behind him and confirm what has taken place. He lingers for some time before finally putting the car in gear and beginning to slowly drive away from the scene, a lonely, empty, highway not far from his family home but far enough from any city to remain empty for some time. Peter drives home and the only time Aster leaves Alex Wolff’s stunned face is to establish as Peter pulls into the family driveway, gets out of the car as if lost in a fugue state and wanders inside.
We return to Peter’s incomprehensibly stunned face as he climbs into bed and lies there for hours unable to sleep and unable to remain awake to the terror that has befallen him. We sit with Alex as the night passes into morning. We stay on Alex’s face as the house comes alive with the sound of Alex’s parents rising and beginning their day. The camera never cuts away from Alex, the terror that is about to unfold is mostly in sound design and scraps of mundane dialogue.
Annie and Steve call out for Charlie and Peter to come to breakfast. Annie begins to worry where Charlie is. She calls for her. She begins to go to the door, we hear only her footsteps and the sound of the front door opening, we’re still on Alex’s profoundly horrified and paralyzed face. The door opens, we hear the crunch of Annie’s footsteps on the rocks in the driveway, we hear her approach the car and finally, we hear a blood curdling scream before we finally cut away.
Great directing is about choices and the choices that Ari Aster makes in this moment to stick closely to the face of actor Alex Wolff is a daring and ingenious choice. The horror of the moment can hardly match the horror of what we assume this moment looks like in reality. Our imagination fills in the horror and because we care for Peter, our horror is magnified by a deep and stomach churning empathy.
This, for me, is among the finest pieces of direction I have ever seen in a horror or genre movie and really, among any kind of movie. It’s a relatively simple manipulation of our collective imagination and yet many directors would ruin it by trying to shock us with horror visuals. Aster knows that our imagination of this moment is more powerful than mere gore. Besides, the rest of the movie has plenty of gore to satisfy that part of our genre hunger.
