Hereditary

Ari Aster's Hereditary works so wonderfully because Aster's story inhabits a tilted, wall-eyed world populated by folks who are a tad too earnest or detached, too intense or unconcerned, who say things that are both meaningful and meaningless, who seem to be loving and indifferent. When the horrors begin we're not immediately sure this is creepy enough to be frightening -- maybe it's just strange. And it is that uncertainty -- and Toni Collette's amazing performance as a frightful mother, wife and daughter in a household haunted either by her Hecuba of a dead mother or by madness -- that holds us tightly through a film that is so deliberately pace it might tax the patience of patrons wanting more solid scares with the abundant grotesquerie.