Part of Midnight Movies

Mother’s Day Eve seems as good a time as any to revisit director Ari Aster’s (BEAU IS AFRAID, MIDSOMMAR) debut feature about familial loss, grief and trauma…and Satanists! When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited. Making his feature debut, writer-director Ari Aster (BEAU IS AFRAID, MIDSOMMAR) unleashes a nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown that exhibits the craft and precision of a nascent auteur, transforming a familial tragedy into something ominous and deeply disquieting, and pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain with its shattering portrait of heritage gone to hell.

“A family tragedy that, seriously, rivals that of the ancient Greeks. HEREDITARY is wicked existential horror.” —April Wolfe, Village Voice (2018)

“Aster might be a first-time writer-director, but he is clearly a natural-born master of horror.” —Dan Jolin, Empire Magazine (2018)

“A tour-de-force turn from Toni Collette powers one of the most affecting horrors in recent memory. Genuinely unsettling in a way few genre efforts are: you’ve been warned.” —Matt Maytum, Games Radar Film, (2018)