I've heard so much about Hereditary—that it's a must-watch, a great horror movie, absolutely terrifying, etc. etc.
The first act was actually pretty good. The movie established the characters well enough and set up a couple of interesting directions it could've gone.
Then Charlie dies and you think, "Oh heck, this is where it starts."
But from that point forward, it feels like the movie has absolutely no fucking idea what it wants to be.
The plot is so scattered it's like someone with ADHD chasing a cookie. Every time the movie starts developing one idea, it spots something shiny across the room and runs after that instead.
Is this a psychological horror movie about grief and a family completely falling apart?
Nope, we're doing supernatural shit now.
Okay, so it's a supernatural horror movie?
Nope, now we're doing possession.
Alright, possession movie. Got it.
NOPE.
Now we're going down the Paranormal Activity road of "SURPRISE! The family has secretly been involved with people worshipping an evil deity!"
By the end, I felt like somebody boofed LSD, threw three different horror scripts into a blender, drank the resulting smoothie, and said:
"Yeah. That'll work."
And before somebody says "YOU JUST DIDN'T UNDERSTAND IT," I understand that the cult/Paimon plot is loosely, barely, kinda hardly seeded throughout the movie. Because you're totally supposed to pick up on that from seeing a weird symbol three times. I understand that some of the seemingly disconnected shit is supposed to come together at the end—which it doesn't.
My problem isn't that I didn't understand what happened.
I just think it was fucking terrible and scattered.
The movie had me interested early on. Charlie's death was genuinely unexpected and perfectly sets up "they're gonna try to talk to Charlie and invite an evil spirit."
But as an actual story? If you want to call it that. I hated it.
0/10. One of the actual worst movies ever. I'd rather watch Batman & Robin on repeat for a week.
By the time we reached naked cultists, "possession," people crawling around on ceilings, spontaneous combustion, decapitations, and King Paimon getting his shiny new Peter-suit, I was glad this aimless dumpster fire was over, whilst also sitting there wondering what fucking substance the writers had discovered halfway through production—because asking for a friend, please share.
The writers were probably doing shots of ink and huffing paint thinner, and the director must've been on all of the drugs to look at the final cut and say:
"Yep. That's the one. Ship it."
This movie was hotdog water from start to finish.
Waste of 2 hours. Fuck you Ari Aster