Hereditary - The Legacy

Movie
German title	Hereditary - The Legacy
Original title	Hereditary
Country of production	United States
original language	English
Publishing year	2018
length	128 minutes
Age rating	FSK 16
Rod
Director	Ari Aster
script	Ari Aster
production	Kevin Scott Frakes , ; Lars Knudsen , ; Buddy Patrick
music	Colin Stetson
camera	Pavel Pogorzelski
cut	Lucian Johnston , ; Jennifer Lame
occupation
	Toni Collette : Annie Graham; Gabriel Byrne : Steve Graham; Alex Wolff : Peter Graham; Milly Shapiro : Charlie Graham; Ann Dowd : Joan;

Hereditary - The Legacy (original title hereditary ., English for "hereditary") is a Mystery - Horror - Drama by Ari Aster , which in the context of the January 21, 2018 Film Festival Sundance celebrated its world premiere. The film was released in US cinemas on June 8, 2018 and in German cinemas on June 14, 2018.

action

It was April 3, 2018 when Ellen Taper Leigh died at the age of 78. Her daughter Annie describes her at the funeral as secretive and as a person who has not revealed anything about her inner life or her fears. Annie is married and lives with her husband Steve and children Peter and Charlie in a wooden house on the edge of the forest. After the funeral service, Annie puts her daughter Charlie to bed, who is mourning her grandmother. Annie recalls that Charlie was Ellen's favorite and, in the old days when Charlie was little, always insisted on feeding her, which sometimes drove Annie insane. Charlie prefers to spend her time in a large tree house on the family's property. There the 13-year-old makes figures from plastic waste and also likes to sleep there. Meanwhile, Mother Annie is busy making models for her planned exhibition "Small World". In the miniature works she shows scenes that she knows from everyday life, such as the hospice where her mother recently passed away.

She cannot talk to anyone in the family about their death and the mixed feelings she had for them. So Annie goes to a self-help group for people who have suffered losses. She reveals to the strangers there that her mother suffered from a dissociative identity disorder and her father from depression . He starved himself to death while her older brother had schizophrenia and hanged himself at the age of 16. Annie explains that she and her mother have drifted apart over the past few years and hardly talked to each other. She wanted to protect her own son Peter from his manipulative grandmother. Without really being to blame, she feels guilty for the entire family situation. She only had contact with her mother again after Charlie was born, which she sometimes regrets.

When Peter wants to go to a party one evening and asks his mother for a car, she insists that he take Charlie there too, even if she doesn't actually want to come. Once there, Peter and his friends withdraw to smoke weed, while he sends Charlie to the cake buffet, which she serves with great appetite. However, she is allergic to the walnuts in the chocolate cake and when Peter realizes his sister's condition, he carries her to the car to take her to the hospital. Charlie gasps for air and when she hangs her head out of the window and Peter has to avoid a dead animal on the street, the worst happens when a road pole rips off her head. Standing in shock, Peter drives home with his sister's headless body and goes to bed.

Mother Annie suffers a nervous breakdown after the accident and Peter suffers badly from the guilt. He can hardly concentrate at school and smoking pot causes him pain and anxiety. Every night, when Peter looks at the tree house, from which the light from the radiant heater shines, he is reminded of the incident, because since the death of his sister his mother has stayed there at night to get some sleep. When Annie visits the self-help group one more time, but then wants to refrain from doing so, she is approached by Joan, who recently lost her son and grandson in an accident. She offers to meet her privately to talk about the loss of her daughter. Annie accepts the offer. Some time later, Joan tells her about her experiences at an open séance . She shows her how to contact her deceased grandson with a candle and the writing tablet. With a candle like this and a mantra, Annie tries to make contact with Charlie at home. Completely overwhelmed by the result, she also wants to show her husband and son, but when Annie suddenly begins to speak in Charlie's voice during a séance, Peter is completely overwhelmed.

Annie discovers in a photo: Joan and her mother wear the same occult mark. It is the seal of Paimon

Peter increasingly suffers from nightly, nightmarish visions. At school it seems like an alien power has taken hold of him and he starts banging his head on a table top until his nose is broken. The incident is too much for father Steve and he decides to protect his son. He sees Annie as a mentally ill person and blames her for what happens to Peter. However, this has a different theory, because in the things of her late mother Annie finds a photo album with pictures of this and Joan. Because they also bear the same occult mark in the photo and she found a book on spiritualism in her mother's things and a message to them that they were born to make sacrifices, Annie believes that she is this sacrifice, that must be provided. Only in this way, she believes, can she protect Peter from further harm.

When Peter wakes up, he finds his father's charred body in the living room. His mother's attempt to burn Charlie's sketchbook, and thus herself, failed. An alien power has taken possession of Annie's body. When Peter takes refuge from her in the attic, he not only sees himself facing his dead grandmother, his mother is also cutting off her own head. Peter jumps out of the window, falls into the garden bed and a small, floating phenomenon of light penetrates his lifeless body. Peter wakes up, climbs up to the tree house and finds himself there in the middle of a black mass . Joan calls him Paimon and explains to him that the body he is now in is healthier than his previous host Charlie.

production

Staff, cast and dubbing

Director Ari Aster and leading actress Toni Collette at Sundance London 2018

The film was produced by A24 . Kevin Scott Frakes and Lars Knudsen acted as producers . The latter had already produced The Witch for A24 . It is in Hereditary to the feature film debut of director Ari Aster , who also wrote the screenplay.

Nina Rehfeld from Spiegel Online explains that the engine of the story is the ineradicability of both banal and catastrophic events that structure a family constellation or, as here, break it up. In many cases, Aster takes off his hat to horror classics such as The Shining or Rosemary's Baby , but without leaning too much on old masters or traditional patterns, and instead creates a very own, totally disturbing atmosphere with great precision, says Rehfeld.

Toni Collette took on the role of Annie Graham in the film, Gabriel Byrne that of her husband Steve. Alex Wolff and the young actress Milly Shapiro play their children Peter and Charlie. Ann Dowd took on the role of Annie's new confidante, Joan.

The German synchronization was based on a dialogue book and the dialogue direction by Wanja Gerick on behalf of Splendid Synchron GmbH, Berlin. Christin Marquitan lends her voice to Annie Graham in the German version.

Filming and equipment

The shooting took place in Utah, so in Salt Lake City and the Utah Film Studios in Park City . Pawel Pogorzelski acted as cameraman . With his camera work and lighting, Pogorzelski approached Hereditary like a film drama. In the third act of the film he worked with harder lights and a little more expression in order to take into account the fact that only then does the film increasingly turn into a horror film.

While the exterior shots of the house were taken in front of an actually existing building in Salt Lake City, all interior shots, such as the lower floor, the second floor, the attic and the interiors of the smaller tree house and a larger tree house for the final scene, were made on a film set . From the cladding to the wallpaper and the wooden floors, Aster designed it together with his production designer Grace Yun .

The film expert Marcus Stiglegger told Deutschlandfunk Kultur that the film has several levels. One of these will be created by the model houses that the protagonist is building. According to Stiglegger, these reflected her life and everyday reality. In the film, however, one also has unexpected montages, connections of images, of image levels, which are then confronted. That is an influence that, if at all, from Nicolas Roegs. If the gondolas carry mourning, perhaps Stiglegger explains it, and thus actually a tradition of horror film that is itself very artistically ambitious. Nina Rehfeld thinks that Pogorzelski's camera drives through the rooms of the house like a slowly, fearfully wandering gaze and creates enormous oppression despite the clear and open architecture. The right-angled order of the domicile and of Annie's minimalist dollhouses only underline the horror, the aster is rooted where it is most haunting: in the feeling of total disintegration.

These miniatures were made by Steven Newman. Aster explained that thematically the miniature houses and rooms that protagonist Annie Graham is making for her upcoming art exhibition are a metaphor for her family's inability to act. The Graham family is manipulated by external forces like in a doll's house. Cinematographer Pawel Pogorzelski explained that special lenses were used to film these models, such as Frazier system lenses, which made it possible to go into these miniatures because they were at the end of a longer tube. Macro lenses were used for further shots so that the camera could focus on these miniatures in close-up shots. Additionally people tilt and shift lenses are used. In order to join the recordings of the miniature sets and the actual film set, so for the shot at the beginning of the film, stickers were attached to the walls of the two bedrooms, which helped the effect artist to put them together in post-production, says Aster.

Film music and publication

Colin Stetson composed the film music . The soundtrack for the film, which includes 23 pieces of music, was released on June 8, 2018 by Milan Records on CD and as a download. Stetson had previously released the pieces Funeral , Charlie , Dreaming and Mothers & Daughters included on the soundtrack . The 22 song Reborn is in many parts of the prelude of the Rhinegold by Richard Wagner ajar.

Marcus Stiglegger told Deutschlandfunk Kultur: “In Stetson's composition, he really goes into the atonal, that he turns noises into leitmotifs, that he incorporates elements of industrial culture that are known from the early 80s into the film music integrated in a way that we have never heard before, at least not yet in a Hollywood-produced film that is marketed so widely. ”He finds this very unusual, says Stiglegger.

The film celebrated its world premiere in January 2018 at the Sundance Film Festival , which was also held in Park City, where it was shown in the Midnight section. As of March 11, 2018, it was presented at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The film was released in US cinemas on June 8, 2018 and in German cinemas on June 14, 2018. Splendid released the film on Blu-ray and DVD in autumn 2018 .

reception

Age rating

In the USA, the film received an R rating from the MPAA , which corresponds to a rating of 17 and over. In Germany, the film was approved for people aged 16 and over . The statement of reasons for approval states: “The film is designed with great detail, draws on typical stylistic devices and motifs of the mystery and horror genre and creates a very oppressive atmosphere. Shock effects and surprising twists are used in a targeted manner, which can overwhelm children and young people under the age of 16 in their drastic nature and in the interplay with the consistently threatening mood. ”Christoph Petersen from Filmstarts notes that this is an absolutely understandable decision. A release from the age of 18 would have been conceivable because of some incredibly intense scenes, but one must also take into account that Hereditary is anything but blunt shock cinema, but rather the pain and guilt that arise in a family over time accumulate, dragged onto the canvas with tremendous force and challenging ambivalence, says Petersen.

Movie genre and reviews

Patrick Wellinski of Deutschlandfunk Kultur places Hereditary in a row with films like Get Out , A Quiet Place and It Follows , which he describes as a new small wave of American horror . The genre researcher and film scholar Marcus Stiglegger told Deutschlandfunk Kultur that this idea of a paranoid world that is getting out of hand around the individual is something that is really clearly seen in these films as a reflection of the social conditions, the political conditions, above all even in America itself, I can tell when everyone mistrusts everyone. Like the film Ghostland by French director Pascal Laugier, Hereditary mirrors this latent chaos in society. Stiglegger adds that the film joins the tradition of the paranoia thriller as a profound psychological thriller that touches upon primal fears.

Daniel Prem from the cinema magazine Uncut.at explains that, unlike most other horror films , Hereditary currently takes enough time to establish its tension, its mood and, above all, its characters and does not use jump-scare parades to keep the audience in the mood bring, and if there were such, be cleverly staged and never placed unnecessarily. The real and mystical elements complement each other wonderfully and result in a complex overall work about family, grief and the question of a choice in life, so Prem. Max Wieseler from moviepilot.de notes that Hereditary is definitely not mainstream horror and is aimed more at a niche audience that wants and can get involved in a demanding and exhausting ordeal. In a review of the Musikexpress it is also said that the cinematic framework of Hereditary is not there to scare you a few times cheaply, but rather the other way around: “Aster takes the spirit world seriously; they are manifestations of deep disturbances and trauma to his characters who perform mourning work but cannot escape who they are and what their family has made them. "

So far, the film has won over 89 percent of Rotten Tomatoes critics and received an average rating of 8.2 out of a possible 10 points. In addition, the film came out of the 20th Annual Golden Tomato Awards in the category Best Horror Movie 2018 as runner-up.

The film critic Antje Wessels writes atquotemeter.de that Hereditary is one of the best horror films of all time. Even if Ari Aster was able to refine his skills as a director in various short films, the sense of style with which he stages the steadily growing madness within the Graham family is powerfully impressive for a debut, Wessels continues. Together with his cameraman Pawel Pogorzelski , his film editors Jennifer Lame and Lucian Johnston and, last but not least, composer Colin Stetson, Aster created an incomparable symphony of horror, according to Wessels: “Without any banal shock effects, a degree of discomfort and anxiety unfolds like us recently similar in Darren Aronofsky's virtuoso, abominable battle painting mother! and is less defined by a quick adrenaline rush than by an omnipresent fear that slowly paralyzes the body. ”About Toni Collette's portrayal, Wessels says that you have to dig into memories for a long time to find a comparable“ In Your Face ”spectacle that passes to us in the marrow and bone. She already refined the films The Sixth Sense and the Fright Night remake with her outstanding acting, but this works almost nothing compared to her performance in Hereditary : “Toni Collette gives up all distance to the audience for her credibility as a mother battered by fate and plays is, in the truest sense of the word, the soul from the body when she screams, desperate and blurs the line between controlled anger and sheer madness more and more. "Nina Rehfeld by Spiegel online writes about Colette, these games in an Oscar-mature appearance this Annie Graham as a wife and mother who slips her family out of her hands after the death of her own aloof mother. Rehfeld speaks of a brilliant presentation, and its raw realism hits the mark.

Gross profit

In the United States, where the film opened in 2,964 theaters on June 8, 2018, which was the largest number of theaters for a film by A24 ( The Witch opened in 2,046 theaters), it grossed $ 13.6 million on its opening weekend and exceeded the expectations of A24 and the experts. The film recorded 120,290 visitors in Germany. The film has worldwide revenues of 79.3 million US dollars, making Hereditary the most successful film produced by A24.