CATS 2019

T.S. Eliot: “The great thing about cats is that they possess two qualities
to an extreme degree—dignity and comicality.”

Director Tom Hooper: "Hold my beer."

Cats was the first Broadway musical I ever saw. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s insanely popular Jellicles-in-a-Junkyard musical was crafted from T.S. Eliot’s 1939 collection of pussy-centric poems: Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and premiered in London’s West End in 1981. It opened on Broadway 17 months later in October of 1982. The Hamilton of its day, tickets for Cats were extremely hard to come by, but I managed to get one for the matinee performance on the afternoon of January 26, 1983, during what was my very first visit to New York. It was a long-saved-for, whirlwind dancer’s holiday of taking classes (given by Anne Reinking!), seeing shows (Little Shop of Horrors, Extremities, Agnes of God, and ill-fated Doug Henning musical Merlin), and being utterly thrilled that the city still looked the way it did in All That Jazz (1979), Fame (1980), and The Fan (1981). 

The Man Who Loved Cat-Dancing
25-year-old me in the throes of serious Cat-mania

I’d been studying dance for a little over two years at this point, ever since Xanadu’s muse-kiss inspired me to drop out of film school and take up classes at L.A.’s Dupree Dance Academy. The earliest time I remember hearing about Cats was when the studio’s owner, having just returned from seeing the London production, enthusiastically spread the word around the studio that Cats was the ultimate dancer’s musical. Declaring it less a voice or acting show and more a two-hour-and-20-minute dance concert, he proclaimed it a must-see experience for anyone seriously studying dance. To my ears, his speech stopped just short of making it mandatory for students interested in staying on at the Academy to make the pilgrimage to New York to see it when it finally opened. 

By description, Cats’ plotless structure sounded a lot to me like a "kitties on a picket fence" version of A Chorus Line: characters introduce themselves to the audience in song; compete against one another towards the attainment of a prized goal; the show concluding with the character who has fallen furthest from grace being given an 11th-hour shot at redemption.

But unlike A Chorus Line’s minimalist stage production, Cats promised uncommon spectacle and an immersive experience born of a $2-million near-gutting of Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater to create an oversized junkyard that spilled from the proscenium-free stage and overtook every square foot of auditorium space up to the balcony.

Cathouse Wednesday
Taken just before attending the 2pm Matinee performance of Cats

Thinking back to seeing Cats on Broadway—then just four months into what would become a record-breaking 18-year-run at the same theater—it’s nearly impossible to separate my thoughts on the show itself from the collective memories of my first visit to New York. But, putting as objective and impartial a face on it as I can, I have to say…Cats was fan-fucking-tastic!

An astounding, never-seen-anything-like-it, sung-through dance concert of captivating beauty and playful, witty charm. (The troweled-on Heaviside layer of mysticism and absurdly misguided self-seriousness was something Cats only acquired later in its legacy run. A byproduct of winning seven Tony Awards and evolving into a “Now & Forever” merchandising industry.)

Between the show’s soaring orchestrations and that breathtaking oversized set, I must have spent the entire evening with my mouth agape and my eyes as big as New York bagels. Goosebump sensations attended every then-unanticipated twist and turn of theatrical magic; my orchestra aisle seat even affording the once-in-a-lifetime experience of nearly being smacked in the face by the Jellicle balls of a frolicsome feline as he climbed over my chair.

Cats came along at a time when--thanks to MTV, aerobics, and TV shows like Fame and Solid Gold, dance was making a post-disco, pop-culture comeback. One of the reasons Cats didn't look nearly as bizarre to me in 1983 as it so clearly was, is because the design of the 'cats' in the show captured the emerging look of '80s concert rock. Enormous, mane-like hairdos, spandex, legwarmers, exaggerated makeup; all were staples of music acts of the day. Indeed, Cats was often criticized for being little more than a stage-bound MTV music video.

My effusive enthusiasm for Cats survived the ‘80s, but began to wane in the new decade, a victim of over immersion (I played my London & Broadway cast Cats albums to death); oversaturation (“Memory” overload…you couldn’t escape that song); and diminished novelty (Thundercats, Zoobilee Zoo, and kids face-painting parties really helped drive that whole anthropomorphic cat thing into the ground). By the time a neutered version of Cats was preserved on video in 1998, I just couldn’t bear to look at another dancer in mime-mode, cupping their hands into paws and whimsically brushing at their invisible whiskers.

Jump ahead to Christmas, 2019. All of Los Angles is covered, from bus shelter to highrise, with signs and billboards heralding the release of “The Most Joyous Event of the Holiday” and “The must-see film event of the year” – a $100 million, all-star, big-screen version of Cats. Had the time finally arrived where I was ready to give Cats another try in a different medium? Could an obscenely expensive movie version restore me, like a male Grizabella, to the Cats-fancier I once was?

Dame Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy

Idris Elba as Macavity the Mystery Cat

Taylor Swift as Bombalurina

Sir Ian McKellen as Gus the Theater Cat

"CATS - 2019"  or  "Jellicle rhymes with Hellicle"

On stage, Cats didn’t really require a plot. It was essentially a cat-sized British Music Hall variety revue featuring a tribe of felines deigning to grant us humans a song-and-dance tour of their secret, nocturnal world. In fact, I’m convinced that a large part of Cats’ phenomenal success is owed to it being one of those shows that can be enjoyed with little or no attention paid to what is happening. All spectacle, song, and movement, folks the world over were able to bring their parents and grandparents to Cats, let them doze off occasionally, and no one had to worry about that pesky business of losing the narrative thread. It may have challenged your sense of reason, but at no time did Cats place any demands on your concentration.

Cats' plot-free structure recalls that other story-free musical about a tribe (of hippies), the 1968 Broadway phenomenon HAIR; so much so that Webber's show could easily have been subtitled HAIR-ball.  (OK, I’m sorry about that.)

But I bring it up because the1978 film adaptation of Hair solved its plotless problem by inventing a naïve outsider character to serve as the audience surrogate (John Savage), and have him fall in with a tribe of New York hippies whose lives we learn about through song. Cats: The Movie borrows the same device. 

Set in London in the 1930s, Cats: The Movie (which I'll be calling it hereon out) has an abandoned housecat named Victoria taken in by a tribe of alley cats calling themselves Jellicles. She arrives on a special night, the night of the Jellicle Ball. An event in which cats dance and compete (in the vaguest ways imaginable) for a chance to ascend to the Heaviside Layer where they’ll be reborn into a new life (we never really find out what the Heaviside Layer is, but I'll lay bets it's something like the "Carousel" in Logan’s Run).

Francesca Hayward as Victoria
Her role as the tribe newbie in Cats serves the same 'stranger in a strange land' narrative purpose
as John Savage's transplanted Oklahoman Claude Hooper Bukowski in the film version of HAIR

Milos Forman was successful in adapting the film version of Hair in a manner both cinematic and true to the spirit of a show many had thought too dated for contemporary relevance. Alas, in bringing Cats to the screen, director Tom Hooper (Les Misérables) stumbles right out of the gate. I’m not aware of how many viable options exist for bringing Cats to the big screen (cartoon animation, stop-motion), but surely at the bottom of such a brief list had to be the idea of making it look like a musical version of The Island of Dr. Moreau crossed with the world’s most expensive PornHub “furries” video.

Some ideas present audiences with such a hefty obstacle to overcome—like saddling The Wiz (1978) with a 33-year-old Dorothy, or casting Mame (1974) with a leading lady who can neither sing nor dance—that no matter how successful other aspects of a production may be, the film never recovers. Such is the case with the decision to make Cats: The Movie with live actors transformed by the “magic” of DFT: digital fur technology.

Robert Fairchild as Munkustrap

Laurie Davidson as Magical Mr. Mistoffeles

I'm not sure anything could prepare me for the kind of keenly-detailed, hyper-realistic anthropomorphic abominations dreamed up by the digital mad scientists behind Cats: The Movie-- furred creatures with too-tiny heads (a result of having their ears moved to the top of their skulls), human hands and feet, and cat faces with lips and human teeth. But this weird conceit might have worked had the film confined its perspective solely to the cats and their cat world and never showed us a human being. Of course, the very first thing Cats: The Movie does IS show us the hands, legs, and feet of a human being (the woman seen tossing the sack-bound Victoria into the junk heap) leaving us to thereafter ponder a world in which cats and their owners share the very same physical characteristics. The mind blows a fuse.
The appearance of the cats is so disturbing, I don't think I heard a single word of the film's first number "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats"; my mind was turning somersaults trying to make sense of all that was being thrown at me. It was like watching the ending of Hereditary while listening to Andrew Lloyd Webber music on headphones.

A fantasy full of hellscape imagery, Cats: The Movie is one of the ugliest films I've ever seen.
And I've seen a naked, tattooed Rod Steiger in The Illustrated Man

Despite my history with Cats, I didn’t come to the film as some kind of purist hoping for a to-the-letter replication of the stage production. Indeed, after having seen the trailer, my expectations for Cats: The Movie were exceedingly low. But I reasoned that surely, given  ALL that money spent and ALL that high-caliber talent assembled, at the very least I would come away with a memory of the music (which I’ve always liked), the dancing (which is plentiful in the film, when the merry-go-round on crack camerawork and ADD editing allow you to actually see it), and a “goosebump moment” or two. 

Well, despite my best efforts to suspend disbelief and allow myself to surrender to Tom Hooper’s vision; two significant elements sabotaged me at every turn: 1) the grossly unappealing, hard-to-look-at digital design of the cats themselves, and  2) the lazy inattention to a consistent size-scale for the cats. In one scene those Jellicles are as tall as doorknobs, the next, scarcely larger than a stemware glass.

Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger

I don’t play video games and I rarely watch superhero films, so the CGI-heavy look of Cats: The Movie—which, in the wide-angle dance sequences create a Colorforms® effect that makes the cats look as though they’re hovering above and in front of their surroundings—never really set right with me. The close-ups are even worse, for the film's digital cat technology is never more blood-curdling than when it's doing its job well. I found myself averting my eyes at the sight of a whiskered Sir Ian McKellen lapping milk out of a saucer, and, mood-killer though it be, I had to watch Grizabella's big number--beautifully sung, by the way---through the fingers covering my eyes...seriously, who the hell thought it was a good idea to have snot cascading like Niagara out of Jennifer Hudson’s human-nose-on-a-cat’s-face throughout her entire frigging song?

Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella the Glamour Cat
Cats are said to have 3 names. If she were my cat, I'd name her Mavis McMucus

Ultimately, watching the film became something of a spine-tingler; every time I found myself relaxing, something would come along to gross me out (James Corden coughing up a furball, for example) or make me curse whatever drugs these people were on to even conceive of such lunacy.
One has to dig up a copy of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, especially one containing the illustrations of Edward Gorey or Nicolas Bentley, to get a sense of the charming wit and self-aware silliness of Eliot’s original cat poems written for his godchildren. You see fleeting glimpses of it in the corners of Cats: The Movie—for example, during “The Ad-dressing of Cats” (which Judi Dench knocks out of the park) there’s a lovely moment after Deuteronomy declares “A cat is not a dog!” and the cats surrounding her exchange glances like children lovingly humoring an elder parent who might be losing it. But those few and far-between hints of playfulness are largely obscured by eyesore production values and a ponderous solemnity that feels tonally at odds with the movie’s in-your-face bizarreness. 

Rumpleteazer (Naoimh Morgan) & Mungojerrie (Danny Collins)
Prepare to be discomfited if you find yourself thinking one of the cats looks hot.
Mungojerrie's got bod.

But I really shouldn’t complain about the film's self-serious tone when Cats: The Movie’s idea of silly fun are those twin atrocities: Jennyanydots and Bustopher Jones. As written, both characters are delightful (Jennyanydots perhaps less so because she's clearly cracked), but as cast, they are simply ghastly. The thunderingly unfunny Rebel Wilson gives us endless pratfalls, David Cronenberg-levels of body horror (her skin comes off!), and Kafkaesque mice and cockroaches with human faces (the latter we get to see her devour moments after they’ve been introduced to us). If it sounds hellish, trust me, it's nothing compared to the visual experience.
With barely time to catch one’s breath, we’re confronted with the equally dire James Corden in an eye-assault number loaded with more pratfalls, spitting, and hits to the groin. All in support of the comic premise that the mere sight of an overweight cat eating is inherently hilarious. Both numbers are such irredeemably crass clusterfucks, they make John Waters movies look like Pixar productions. 

Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots

James Corden as Bustopher Jones

Grizabella's story arc, which represents Cats' underlying message (bet you're surprised to know there is one!): that everybody just wants to be accepted for who they are, each of us is unique and we should celebrate our differences, all while recognizing our shared humanity (or, unashamed felinity) and common dignity—is emphasized further in Cats: The Movie by the invention of Victoria and her forgettable Oscar-bait new song. It's a nice message for what is essentially a story for children. Even I (after subjecting myself to Cats: The Movie a second time to write this essay) felt my pugnaciously set jaw unclench when the unceasingly overwrought Grizabella finally smiles, and when Victoria finds her new family. 

And another theater and dance major finds her new gay bestie.
From the start, I just took it for granted that Mr. Mistoffeles was a sensitive gay cat, and everybody applauding the mastery of his magical powers at the end was a metaphor for his coming out of the closet. The film, however, kept thrusting the implausible pairing of Victoria and Mistoffeles at us, when all I wanted was for her to end up with the hunkier Munkustrap 

So that I might end things on an upbeat note here, let me just say that there were a few things about Cats: The Movie that I liked, very much indeed.
I'm a verified cornball, so I found it a thrill to hear Andrew Lloyd’s Webber’s gorgeous score again after so many years, doubly thrilling to find I still knew all the words. Despite their familiarity, certain songs and musical passages  (especially during the Jellicle Ball, when Hooper could be trusted to let the music take over and not break the rhythm with cutaways) sustained their ability to move me and give me waterworks (calling to mind the line from Noel Coward’s Private Lives: “Extraordinary how potent cheap music is”).

The dancing in the Jellicle Ball sequence is superb and marvelously staged; Jason Derulo, though ill-served by that terrible song, makes for a welcome, James Brownish Rum Tum Tugger; and Taylor Swift has fun playing Nancy to Idris Elba's Bill Sykes. But the one number to give me that much sought-after "goosebump moment" was "Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat." It’s terrific. And for once music, the dancing, and CGI all come together to create a moment of only-possible-in-the-movies magic.

It has always been my favorite song from the show anyway, its earworm rhymes and peppy rhythms reminding me of a children's chant, but for my taste, it’s the only musical sequence to strike a tone of playfulness and fantasy that is thoroughly exhilarating. Helping out in no small part is the fact that it's a tap number, so a measurable element of weight factors into it (the magic of dance has always been the dancer's triumph over gravity. The overuse of special effects and CGI in movies always places dancers in a zero-gravity limbo rendering it unimpressive). 

Steven McRae as Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat

Secondly, it helps to an immeasurable degree that Skimble has pants on. Outfitted with tap shoes, suspender britches, and conductor’s whistle; when his cap is on, The Railway Cat looks less like an anthropomorphic nightmare and more like a shirtless, abundantly hirsute ginger fellow with a handlebar mustache, tattoo sleeves...and a tail.

The1962 Judy Garland-Robert Goulet animated musical Gay Purr-ee

So while I didn’t enjoy Cats: The Musical very much and think the show would have been better served as an animated feature, as both a movie fan and musical theater geek, I also hold the opinion that a lousy screen adaptation of a Broadway musical is still better than no screen adaptation at all. And as was my experience with the much-pilloried 1977 movie version of A Little Night Music, maybe folks who’ve never seen Cats onstage will feel differently about the film than I did.

I don't know if Tom Hooper made the Must-See Film Event of the Year, but I'll tell you this, Tom Hooper’s Cats turned out to be precisely the movie 2020 deserves.

A suitably repurposed ad for the 1969 thriller Eye of the Cat

BONUS MATERIAL

If you're like me, after seeing Cats: The Movie you'll be ready to kill the first person who ever dares utter the word "Jellicle" in your presence. But for the record, according to Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jellicle cat is "dear little cat" (as Pollicle Dog is "poor little dog") as misheard by T.S. Eliot when he was a child.

On Friday, May 15, 2020, Andrew Lloyd Webber provided a livestream commentary for the YouTube airing of the 1998 straight-to-video production of Cats featuring the British touring company. Benefitting The Actors Fund and dedicated to the recent death of his cat Mika, the commentary was notable to me for: the constant (hilarious) digs and potshots Webber made at Tom Hooper's film; getting choked-up watching the finale number; and the brief visit by Oddy (pictured), another member of Webber's cat family.

 Tom Hooper can take solace in the fact that finding the proper scale for
humanoid cats has always been a problem. In this 1986 anti-smoking PSA, 
Andrew Lloyd Webber's felines are as small as mice.

I Tawt I Taw a Putty Tat!
Cats is bookended by the image of a cat's face on the right side of the frame peeking out through the clouds over London. At the start of the film the cat is seen winking. At the conclusion, it just stares out in dumbfounded shock. Like the audience.

Copyright © Ken Anderson 2009 - 2020

HEREDITARY 2019

"When you get older, there isn't a lot left to be frightened of."

Mrs. Ada Quonsett  Airport (1970)

I was an easy scare as a kid. Afraid of the dark as well as my own shadow, I posed little challenge to older sisters who loved to leap out at me from closets and around corners; their shouts of “Boo!” eliciting a shriek of terror or tearful outburst (often both), followed by the usual threat-yelled-in-retreat, “I’m gonna tell mamma!”

Paradoxically, when not being terrorized by siblings, I did a pretty good job of terrorizing myself. I'm not sure why, but being a dyed-in-the-wool scaredy-cat proved no deterrent to raiding my sister's horror comic book collection (resulting in nightmare-filled bouts of sleeping with the bedcovers pulled all the way over my head), or watching scary anthology TV shows like Thriller or The Outer Limits. Programs that taught me no good can come of exploring the source of a mysterious noise, and that fear comes with its own soundtrack. Just hearing the first few notes of Gounod's Funeral March of the Marionette (aka, the theme from Alfred Hitchcock Presents) was enough to make my skin go all gooseflesh. Similarly, John Williams’ nerve-jangling Suspense Theater theme and that hair-raising whistling intro to Journey to the Unknown.

Toni Collette as Annie Graham

Gabriel Byrne as Steve Graham

Naturally, this masochistic desire to have the bejesus scared out of me extended to movies, too, but by the time big-screen psychological thrillers replaced the atomic monsters and vampires of Saturday afternoon TV,  I'd developed a better understanding of what I was after: the emotional jolt of the safe, vicarious scare. The payoff was that my naturally jittery nature meant that I got more bang for my buck.

I came to enjoy the sensation of sitting in the dark and surrendering myself to whatever reality these films presented; the deeper I immersed myself, the more thrilling the ride. But with the waning of the 1960s, the make-believe horrors of movies like Wait Until Dark (“What did they want with her? What did they want with her?” screamed the film's poster ad copy to my abject terror) and Rosemary’s Baby (“What have you done to its eyes?”) couldn't keep pace with the real-life terrors served up every night on the TV news. Fiction proved no match for the horrific reality of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; the unsolved mystery of the Zodiac Killer; or the nightmare of the Manson Family. So when feeling frightened became a way of life instead of an escapist outlet, I knew it was time to give horror movies a rest.

Alex Wolff as Peter Graham

Then came the '70s, and with it, a slew of new-fangled sources of anxiety: Watergate, the Vietnam War, inflation. All led me to reflect on the inadequacy of Roosevelt's oft-paraphrased, "There's nothing to fear, but fear itself." No, fear itself is plenty to be afraid of. With civilization edging ever closer to resembling those disaster films that were so popular at the time, I once again found myself seeking the sanctuary of scary movies. Happily, the '70s presented no shortage of films offering ample opportunities for primal scream venting: The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976),  Burnt Offerings (1976), and The Sentinel (1977).

Milly Shapiro as Charlie Graham

While I don’t tend to think of myself as a horror movie fan, I obviously consumed enough of them to start to take notice of the clichés, the repetition, and the recycling of themes. Instead of offering up the unanticipated and disturbing, horror movies began to pander to their audiences by following box-office-driven guidelines geared to giving the horror fan everything they expected.
The more market-friendly horror movies became, the more they needed to resemble product. Goodbye, to the unexpected, and hello to by-the-numbers horror plotting and slasher villains armed with quotable quips and taglines.

The Graham Home
As haunting a presence in Hereditary as The Overlook Hotel in The Shining

Which is a shame, because now that I'm no longer the easily-scared kid I used to be, finding a horror movie that gets me to believe in the unbelievable is hard enough; finding one that's actually frightening is becoming a near-impossibility. Gore, jump-edits, loud noises, and a heavy metal song played over the closing credits does not a horror film make (which should come as news to Elie Roth and Rob Zombie). For a movie to really scare me, it at least has to come from a place that is emotionally honest. Hopefully, while tapping into some elemental, suppressed anxiety rooted in human vulnerability and the fear of mortality.

Ann Dowd as Joan

Two recent films effectively and memorably accomplished such a feat. The first was in 2017 when Get Out, the impressive feature film debut of director/screenwriter Jordan Peele, hit me where I lived by using the daily microaggressions of soft racism as the core of its horror premise. The second time was in 2018 when director Ari Aster, another emerging filmmaking talent, made his directing / screenwriting debut with Hereditary. While Get Out was unsettling in a thoroughly unique and personal way (the Black experience of racism as terrorism has always been ripe fodder for the horror genre), Hereditary bridged the above-stated "near-impossibility" gap by reacquainting me with the almost-forgotten, old-fashioned, pleasurable unpleasantness of simply being scared shitless by a motion picture. 

The Dollhouse Effect
Hereditary manipulates the viewer's sense of perception. Many scenes begin with our being 
uncertain whether we're witnessing real life or merely looking at one of Annie's miniatures. 

I came to Hereditary not knowing anything about the story; all I knew was that it was a movie starring Toni Collette, an actress (like Laura Dern) I could watch in anything. I’d just finished binge-watching Collette's limited BBC One series Wanderlust on Netflix, and her extraordinary performance in that program left me clamoring for more. Always intrigued when an actor of her caliber appears in a horror movie, I purposely avoided reading anything about Hereditary beforehand, preferring to dive in blindly with eyes wide open, curiosity piqued, and with a great deal of enthusiasm.

I wasn’t disappointed.
In fact, I’m not even sure it's possible to be disappointed by Hereditary, for it's a film that has, as its primary defining characteristic, a dogged refusal to deliver anything remotely resembling the expected.

Portrait in Black

The death of a family matriarch is the catalyst event sparking an interlinked eruption of remorse, reflection, and revelation that ultimately sends an already loosely-tethered family spiraling horrifically out of control. Annie (Toni Collette), whose mother died in hospice after a long, grasping illness, is an artist whose method of coping with her traumatic childhood is to recreate the most painful events in breathtakingly disturbing miniature dioramas. And with a history involving a mother who suffered from dissociative identity disorder; a clinically depressed father who starved himself to death; and an older brother with committed suicide when she was just a teenager, Annie is not exactly at a loss for traumas to draw upon for her work.

Small Worlds

Understandably, Annie's family legacy of mental illness hasn't left her unscathed. In fact, her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is the psychiatrist who saw her through a nervous breakdown. No longer his patient and largely managing to handle her issues with her late mother, a dark cloud hangs over the family due to a terrifying sleepwalking incident two years prior, in which Annie doused herself and her two sleeping children in paint thinner, awakening only as she heard herself striking a match. As a result, Annie's relationship with her now 16-year-old son Peter (Alex Wolff) has grown strained and contentious. At the same time, her 13-year-old developmentally disabled daughter Charlie—who shared an unnaturally close relationship with her deceased grandmother—also channels her emotional dissociation into creating art. In her case, the creation of creepy, pagan-like figurines.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Afflicted with a lethal allergy to nuts, Charlie's sweet tooth and love of chocolate
turns every member of the family into around-the-clock sentinels 

Hereditary presents us with a dysfunctional family caught in the aftermath of a tragedy. As each is faced with the difficult task of processing loss, a series of disturbing, seemingly random events threaten what appears to be the hard-won calm of the household. Charlie's bereavement over the loss of her beloved grandmother manifests in the peculiar concern that no one is left to take care of her. Steve takes to drinking as he grows stressed and overburdened with always having to be the family's steadying force. Juggling complicated feelings of maternal mistrust, blame, and resentfulness, Peter numbs himself with drugs. And Annie, anxious about her own sanity while plagued with guilt over what role, if any, her genes and history have played in the fates of her children. Sensitive to the stress all of this has already placed on her marriage, she isolates herself--both physically and emotionally--while suppressing resentment over feeling she has no one to whom she can unburden herself.

Intimate Strangers

What I like most about Hereditary is that it is essentially a dark family drama cloaked in a horror film. Using the constricted, hemmed-in spaces of dollhouses as a visual motif, the film presents us with a family coping with unbearable trauma. Yet, they persist in shutting themselves off from one another. And not because they want to; they simply lack the tools to do otherwise. Barely speaking, struggling to communicate when they do, each remains in their separate, insular spaces, victims of their own severely-flawed coping mechanisms. It's a rarity for a horror film to put human conflict and emotional incapacitation so front and center, but the brilliance of Hereditary is that once the narrative dives off into almost grotesque levels of horror, our hard-earned investment in these characters makes everything that happens all the more terrifying.

Contents Under Pressure

Like the sinister sculpture perched near the stairwell of the Graham house--another of Annie’s grim works of art, it’s a depiction of three deteriorating houses sinking, one atop the other, deep into the bowels of the earth--Hereditary presents us with a family enveloped in personality pathology sinking under the weight of the kind of crisis and catastrophe that's worthy of Greek Tragedy. As horrific events multiply and natural threats take on a preternatural cast, the film's pervading atmosphere of dread makes even the most startling, mind-bending developments feel somehow inevitable.

Don't Be Afraid

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When film critic Pauline Kael titled her 1965 collection of reviews I Lost it at The Movies, she was (wittily) referencing the subtle loss of innocence that happens each time one watches a film. It's a slow maturing process that begins with being so unfamiliar with the vocabulary of cinema, everything elicits a strong response because it is all so fresh and new. As we grow more accustomed to the tropes of narrative structure and film's visual language, our experience of moviegoing becomes more enriched, but often at the cost of our ever really being able to recapture that sense of awe and astoundment born of our movie innocence. I readily admit that each new film I see brings the hope of reclaiming a trace of that lost innocence. Even if it's only for the length of one scene.
Hereditary brought a lot of those feelings back for me. Everything about the film caught me off guard. So much so that watching it became a little unnerving for me. It brought back that long-forgotten sense of feeling on edge long after a film ended, my mind carrying around a vague apprehension that resulted in an over-awareness of noises and a wariness of shadows.

"You never even cried as a baby- you know that? Not even when you were born."

A movie like Hereditary makes suspension of disbelief terribly easy, for in addition to being skilled at keeping the viewer off-balance, it's a story told on its own terms, in its own unique voice, and benefits from a distinct, fully-realized world view. And in a horror film landscape increasingly dominated by the box office-friendly predictability of franchises, a movie as audaciously bizarre and off-the-rails as Hereditary feels like a revitalization of the genre. 

The visual motif of low ceilings, narrow corridors, and confined spaces reinforce themes of emotional confinement and the notion that the Grahams (by heredity) are manipulated like dolls in a dollhouse by fate.

With each frame crammed to overflowing with information, clues, and foreshadowing, Hereditary is a film that practically demands a second viewing. If only to discover all the pieces of the puzzle that had been laid out, hidden in plain sight, from the first go-round.

PERFORMANCES
It's accepted that horror films, like comedies, rarely get any respect come awards season. For every Sissy Spacek Best Actress nomination for Carrie (1976) or Ellen Burstyn for The Exorcist (1973), there are far too many Mia Farrow (Rosemary's Baby - 1968) - Deborah Kerr (The Innocents - 1961) snubs.
Toni Collette, all exposed nerve-endings and bottled-up tensions, gives the performance of her career in Hereditary. But, unfortunately, she's so inarguably brilliant, her being passed over for an Oscar nomination feels more like a voter response to what can charitably be called a "difficult" film than an oversight regarding one of the most compelling screen performances of the year.

Hereditary boasts superb and sensitive performances from its entire cast, but Toni Collette pushes waaaay beyond the usual boundaries, inhabiting a complicated, dimensional characterization. Equally impressive, to a heartbreaking degree, is Alex Wolff as the son. Not since Timothy Hutton's agonized (and Oscar-winning, I'd like to point out) performance in Ordinary People (1980) have I seen such a movingly recognizable depiction of adolescent grief. There's an unforgettable moment in Hereditary where Wolff, at a point in the story when family relationships are at a peak deterioration point, is standing silently by his bike outside the front door, trying to muster up the courage to simply enter the house. It's a heart-wrenching example of how Ari Aster somehow makes the small moments pay off as powerfully as the large scale.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

Singular-vision films like Hereditary and Get Out--both amplifications of the day-to-day terrors of contemporary life--do a great job of injecting some much-needed vitality and blood (literally) into a genre grown anemic over the years of tapping into the same worn-out vein of horror tradition. It took Aster five years to get Hereditary to the screen, directing from his own screenplay, and, from all accounts, finalizing every detail of the production before even a foot of film was shot. The end result is one of the most effectively scary horror films I've ever seen. An uncompromising work of individuality that still manages to pluck the nerves of universal anxieties. 

Annie's art installation dioramas were created by Steve Newburn, and Hereditary's stunning production design was by Grace Yun. Everything from Colin Stetson's shivery musical score to cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski's eerily burnished images, combined with Aster's sculptural blocking and emphatic use of stillness, turns the characters into mannequins--work in concert to formulate Hereditary's blue-hued world of haunted interiors.

The members of the Graham family move about from one isolated space to another. Even when they leave the confines of their homes, they merely find new places to be alone.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

 For me, the mark of a truly effective horror film, a quality evident in favorites like Rosemary’s Baby, Carrie, or Don’t Look Now, has always been its ability to make me feel something for the characters. To get me to relate to and/or empathize with their circumstances to the degree that I care what happens and I’m engaged in whatever conflicts—emotional or psychological—arise.

In the equally-bereaved Joan, Annie finds someone outside the home to whom she can confide.
Or has she? 

Horror films are hollow films if they don't feature characters with whom you can identify or situations whose outcomes you can become invested in. Hereditary goes to places that even fans of the genre find disturbing, but the darkness feels at one with the world Aster has created.
I don't know what kind of mind could come up with a movie like Hereditary, let alone the genius capable of pulling it off so tremendously. But my hat is off to Ari Aster for taking so many chances, and in the process, reminding me what a thrill it is to be scared at the movies again. 

Unsafe Cinema
Nothing's more terrifying than a horror film that takes death, loss, and grief seriously.

BONUS MATERIAL
Hereditary father and son Gabriel Byrne and Alex Wolff played father and son in the HBO series In Treatment from 2008 to 2010.

Psychologist Paul Weston and his son Max

Modern Family / Ordinary People 
The original cut of Hereditary ran 60 minutes longer than the theatrical release.
The original shooting script is available to read HERE.

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 20019