Hereditary Review

Aster's debut works because it is a family drama first and a horror film second, and it cheats on neither. Toni Collette plays Annie as a woman with a grief she is not permitted to name, and her dinner table monologue is the loudest, ugliest and best piece of acting in American horror this decade. Pawel Pogorzelski composes the frame like a dollhouse and then holds it, so terror arrives inside the shot rather than through a cut: the corner of a dark room, a ceiling, a shape that does not move.

Colin Stetson's saxophone score sounds like breathing through a wall. The daylight sequence at the midpoint is the cruellest single transition we can remember, a horror consisting entirely of a boy driving home and not turning around, and Alex Wolff's paralysed guilt afterwards is the real engine of the picture. The final fifteen minutes swap dread for explanation and lose some of their grip, and the cult mechanics turn more literal than the miniatures deserve. Everything up to the treehouse is close to flawless.