Day 5: Hereditary - A Masterclass in Psychological Horror.
Ari Aster is a man who truly knows how to make weird and unnerving stories. Some of you might not realize it, but the short film that first put him on the map was The Strange Thing About the Johnsons. If you’ve ever seen that one, you already know just how wild his mind can get. Hereditary takes that same unsettling energy and stretches it into a full-blown psychological horror film about a family drowning in grief after two devastating losses: their secretive matriarch and their youngest member, who dies in a brutal accident. If you haven’t seen it yet, this one’s an easy recommendation. It’s a damn good horror movie, and I guarantee you won’t see where it’s going.
Toni Collette stars as Annie Graham, a miniature artist trying to make sense of life after losing her mother. At first, the family seems to be holding it together, but there’s a quiet tension in the air that never really fades. Annie throws herself into her work, her husband tries to keep things normal, and the kids each deal with their grief in their own unsettling ways. Then tragedy strikes again, shattering whatever fragile balance they had left. From that point on, the film shifts from emotional pain to pure psychological chaos, pulling you into a nightmare that feels way too real.
Toni Collette’s performance is nothing short of a masterclass. The raw emotion she pours into Annie is hard to put into words. You can feel every ounce of her pain, frustration, and anger in every scene, and it’s genuinely haunting to watch. For a film that dives deep into the supernatural, her performance feels surprisingly human, as if she’s carrying the entire weight of the story on her shoulders. Honestly, if I went through half of what Annie did, I’d probably end up in St. Ann’s.
Another major focus of the story is Annie’s son, Peter. He’s a young man drifting through life, spending his days getting high with friends and trying to avoid the heaviness that hangs over his family. But when tragedy strikes, Peter becomes the one “responsible” for the second major loss that tears what’s left of his family apart. His younger sister, Charlie, dies in a freak “accident” while he’s with her, an event so shocking and painful that it permanently fractures his relationship with his mother. The guilt Peter carries after that moment is crushing, and it pushes both him and Annie into even darker emotional territory. What’s interesting, though, is how the film makes you wonder if Peter’s actions were ever truly his own choice or if something larger was quietly guiding every move he made.
The idea of destiny quietly hangs over every scene. From the start, there’s this eerie sense that the family’s pain isn’t random, that each moment of suffering might be part of a pattern set long before any of them were born. Even the title, Hereditary, hints at something deeper than just genetics. It’s like the film is whispering that what’s passed down through a family isn’t always visible. It could be grief, it could be guilt, or it could be something way darker. Watching it, you get this strange mix of fascination and dread, like you’re peeking into a world where your own family secrets might just be pulling the strings behind the scenes.