That’s going to leave a mark.

There are a lot of flavors of horror films, and that’s not even getting in a classic versus modern sensibility. Thee are monster movies, slasher movies, psychological horror movies, young people in peril movies, torture porn movies, devil movies, nut after viewing Hereditary I had to come up with what I thought of as a new sub-genre, emotional horror movies. Hereditary does not move by gross out or violence, it is not a film with a central unstoppable threat moving through the plot leaving a wake of corpses, but rather the film forces the audience to confront raw, tragic emotional power.

The focuses on a family grieving after the death of their grandmother, a complex woman who left behind a tangled web of secrets and emotional damage to everyone she touched. Her daughter, Annie is played by Toni Collette, is an artist specializing in realistic miniature dioramas, dioramas taken from her real life and a metaphor for Annie’s desperate need to control her life. With her mother’s influencing her family well after the grandmother’s death, Hereditary at first appears to be following in the tradition of horror literature such as The Turning of the Screw where events may or may not represent the character’s distorted point of view but by the middle of the second act a darker and more mysterious malignancy motivates the movie. This film has one of the most shocking act one to act two transitions I have witnessed and all of it down with off-screen violence and terror that plays out on the actor’s faces and their anguished screams. Truly for several minutes I expected the sequence to be a nightmare but eventually the film forced to me to confront it had really gone where it went.

Drawing on paranoia such as in Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and supernatural suburban invasion such as in Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and the inescapable fate of a Greek tragedy. Hereditary is a dark unrelenting film that eschews audience comfort and optimism for its artist vision.

This is by far not a film for everyone. Whenever there is a sharp divergence between the critics’ and general audience scores on aggregate sites such as Rotten Tomatoes such as with The Witch and with Hereditary, it often suggests that a film is more challenging than the usual fare and that is the case here. This is not a horror film for people in search of action, thrills, or escapism. (Not that those are bad things, I enjoy all three but it would be a poorer world if that was all there was to enjoying film.) With only a touch of snark I tweeted that Hereditary is a movie for people who find Black Mirror too optimistic.

I want to give a special shout out to the production design and the fantastic cinematography. This is one of the rare films where I noticed the color palette because it so perfectly fit the tone of the piece. Also director/screenwriter Ari Aster and cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski creative and visually stunning mishmash of scale where the miniature looked massive and the massive looked miniature not only made for beautiful compositions but perfectly symbolized tone, theme, while keeping the audience off balance, critical