MOVIE REVIEW – When the paranoid traumas of Polanski marry the skill of the new guard of the supernatural cinema, the result is terrific of fright and control. Heredity is a monstrous and deviant cinema, of that date. Psychological and graphic terror at the same time.

When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, dies, her family discovers more and more terrifying secrets about her lineage. A sinister heredity to which it seems impossible to escape. For his first feature film, Ari Aster, director and screenwriter, unveils a unique vision, transforming a family tragedy into a nightmare awake.

Sold in European countries with an amazing buzz, the new production A24 really carries in it the hope of the horrifying renewal; so, inevitably, as we enter the hall, we are bound to wait for a painful slap, a new date for genre cinema, the one to which its sulphurous reputation has prepared us.

A master of horror

We find the genius of these founding works in the virtuosity of the realization which solidly accompanies the mechanisms of the anxiety, with a sense of space, a fluidity of the plans, which give meaning to the point of view of the camera, where nothing ever seems free, even when the horror is explicit. Solid architecture does not make a clean sweep of the past to build its impressive climate of psychological deliquescence.

Ari Aster believes as much in the intensity of cerebral terror as his predecessors: we will quote among the prophets of the genre, David Lynch, Aster giving birth for his first screen on the most invigorating: a free work, which knows how to discard elementary formulas to advance in a courageous narration.

The audacious realization gradually invites us to sink into a feeling of collective madness where our resistance, as a spectator, is inexorably attacked. All our a priori disappear when the fantastic, tortuous and painfully graphic unfolds in hallucinating sequences, where we do not know what to believe anymore.

Reconstruction of the genre

The major interest for the viewer lies in finding in the impulses of fear and horror, the unhealthy pleasure that the genre when it touches the sublime, can provide. The author Ari Aster reconstructs the genre that was believed to be gangrenous by his commercial relationship with the adolescent public; yet he also knows how to use the dreadful codes of a James Wan when he is at his best, in the involvement of the supernatural and evil presences, in the darkest scenes. However, unlike the filmmaker of The Conjuring , this new genius in the mise en abyme of depressive emotions, delivers a complex work of remarkable maturity, finally far crazier than a Get out, which, at times, was reduced to some old formulas (the nice girlfriend who turns into ten seconds in the fiercest bitches).

Excellent director of actors, Aster composes with a casting of the first choice. Toni Collette, well known in the series United States of Tara where she multiplied contrary personalities, is here frightfully affected. She deserves an Oscar nomination, for her incarnation of Mater Dolorosa overwhelmed, which we follow the fall in the irrational, landing step by step. She is absolutely wonderful. It is perhaps even his greatest performance, offered to the evil and sinuous environment of a microcosm of terror, where we enjoy being lost without ever knowing where this tortuous story will lead, if it is, and we will not betray the film by suggesting it, to a paroxysm of madness and disturbing horror.

-PS4Pro-