This piece was first left as a review on the website RateYourMusic.com. I was reviewing Hereditary, the film by Ari Aster. This is another piece that was informed a lot by its nature as a piece specifically for RYM. That website displays all reviews together, and so I was expecting for mine to appear alongside that of Max "Nostalghia" Coombes. I love his review as a piece of writing, and I happen to agree with what it has to say. He said all that needed to be said about the visual aspect of the film as far as I'm concerned, which is why here I gloss over that and instead focus on just the writing. If I were writing for a standalone publication I would have had to regurgitate his opinions in my own words I expect.
It's pretty easy to dismiss Hereditary as uninteresting on purely aesthetic grounds in my opinion, since it's so fixated on accidentally dispassionate zooms and the bizarre game of chicken it tries to play with the viewer expecting and not expecting jump scares. I think the easiest way to explain why I hate this film is to say why I think the writing is offensive.
Charlie is an offensively archetypal autistic girl that exists as a source of discomfort for the neurotypical characters, and for the neurotypical viewers. Notice how often her quirks are made to look like foreshadowing for when she goes mental and starts doing little-girl-in-horror-movie shit. Only, it's all misdirection, dummy! Her actual purpose in the narrative was to be disgustingly and shockingly owned so that her poor family could then sink deeper into their own mental illness. Illness which, by the way, is suggested by its interchangeability with susceptibility to devil magic to be an allegory for how marginalised people are susceptible to dangerous ideas. Is this whole film actually just a really clever and woke defence of the humanity of incels?
Tasteless trash.