Red Mike at the Movies: Hereditary

So this was one of a couple of movies I’d intended to see last year.

For reasons I’ll not go into here I watched a lot of movies in theaters last year.  And I will, eventually, review them all.  But for right now, I saw the trailer for this one, but didn’t see it (despite checking on-line to find out if there was anywhere in the state of New Hampshire where it was showing).

Well, what with this and that, even after it came out on video last fall I didn’t get around to seeing it until just now.  Which means that I could now read the reviews of the movie.  (Under the rules of The Movie Game I’m not allowed to read reviews until after I’ve seen the show.)

Imagine my surprise on learning how many critics loved the movie.

Here’s my take on this film:

• Unreliable narrator is unreliable.
• This is why IEA* was invented.
• 9-1-1 is there for a reason.

Also, there was an event early on in the film (by “early on” I mean an hour in — this was one long puppy) which desuspended my disbelief in a big way.

*Involuntary Emergency Admission

SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER

When you have a traumatic decapitation by smacking your head into a phone pole at 80 mph, you don’t get a nice, discrete, round, still-recognizable head lying by the side of the road. You get a debris field covering about ninety square feet with no bit bigger than about a half-inch on a side.  Ask me how I know.  Or, better still, don’t.

END SPOILER END SPOILER END SPOILER

So, what we get is a family drama requiring you to spend two hours with four people who are so basically unpleasant that you wouldn’t want to spend five minutes with them.  Yes, mental health is a serious problem.  Yes, mental health is the thing we do worst in modern medicine.  But I’m not sure this is the way to bring it to the public consciousness.

Let’s see: what did I like?  The miniature rooms were wonderful.  I looked through the credits to see if the model maker had a credit (the answer is yes, three people).  Also, the husband, Steve (played by Gabriel Byrne), did a great job of portraying the ground-down look of someone living with a chronically-ill person.

Final score:  I put this one in the same bucket as Cabin Fever.  The bucket labeled “nice try.”