Reviewed by: Jay Andrews Tracy

My Review Rating: 3 ½ out of 5

Spoilers live in every family!

Hereditary is a movie about an ordinary family that lives in the backwoods of Utah. You will see the movie start out with a miniature of a house that is an exact copy of the house they live in. After the death of Ellen, who is the mother of Annie (Toni Collette), Annie tells people at the funeral how much she didn’t really like her mother, and how private she was to her.

Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is Annie’s daughter, who seems to have mental problems at the beginning of the movie. She has this weird clicking noise that she makes from time to time, and says she was “raised” by Ellen. Charlie has a brother Peter (Alex Wolff) who took Charlie to a party, where he ended up smoking marijuana, and Charlie, who is allergic to nuts, started having an allergic reaction to something she ate. Peter rushed Charlie home, and ended up killing her in the process.

When Annie tries to deal with her daughter’s death she ends up going to a support group that leads her eventually to a lady named Joan (Ann Dowd), who befriends Annie. Once that happens they talk about the death in their family and then Joan invites Annie to her house and performs a séance to try to communicate with Annie’s daughter and Joan’s son.

We find out later that Ellen was a part of a cult who is trying to resurrect King Paimon, who is a demon from Hell. King Paimon is trying to come back as a physical being instead of a celestial being, by taking over the Ellen’s family. The process is terrifying and ends up leading Annie to becoming quite crazy.

There is a lot of symbolism in the movie, because of the cult and the spells or rituals that they perform. It is very precise. The director (Ari Aster) did his research on the movie’s mechanics before filming, which I enjoyed quite a bit. There are also a lot of interesting twists to the plot as well.

This movie was very well directed as I mentioned previously and well written, also by director Ari Aster. This movie is an independent movie, and did very well in the theaters. The budget gross world wide was $77,514,317 which is pretty amazing. Ari said there was no plan for a sequel, which is a bummer because I would love to see a continuing storyline. If you are into suspenseful psychological and supernatural horror, you might enjoy this. Even though some people gave it a bad rating, I give it a 3 ½ out of 5.