HEREDITY, the hell of the family – Criticism

The first feature ofAris Aster is an undeniable critical success, which many consider as already worship. Difficult to miss this horror movie succeeded in the ambition promising.

When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, dies, the secrets coming back to make waver the base family. If INHERITANCE manages to touch its target, and we terrify much it is because it plays on our deepest anxieties. Focusing on the family unit, Aris Aster composed a myth in psychoanalytic modern built on a structure of Greek tragedy. With the help of amazing formal mastery, the developer installs with attention to an atmosphere of anxiety that he will slowly grow as the film progresses. The effects scary hiding in a science millimétrée of the composition of the frames, the duration of the plans that stretch all the way up to the anguish and mounting sometimes incisive, which breaks a pre-set pace. The young director knows how to use the out-of-field and create the threat in the shadow of the backgrounds. It we cleaning constantly in order to better impose on us visions of a psychotic out of no darkest nightmares.The idea of the tragedy is clearly exposed in the first shot in the film, as the camera moves slowly to the miniature house, in a game of mise en abyme, the framework enters the room of Peter who is sleeping. The argument is clear, the characters are mere toys at the mercy of a demiurge, all-knowing. After we announced that in order to better keep us in a waiting icy with which the director knows how to play. The story is full of prophetic elements (motif recurring heads cut off) are supposed to describe the mechanical inferno that inevitably leads to the disruption of the family unit. Everything is played in advance, and the viewer attends, powerless, to the development of a plan macabre that finds its resolution in a violent catharsis. The tongue click of the little Charlie who comes back in a cyclic manner, surprises us and frightens us, it is reminiscent of the ticking of a hand clock referring to the time that passes and brings us closer to inevitable end of evil. Behind the needle is the image of the spiral of evil that closes the trap on the protagonists. The staging is highly stylized adopt the point of view of the demiurge who observes his pawns discuss. The symmetry which consist of the frames is installed only to be destroyed and drag it to an imbalance abyss.Once again, the use of the genre gives to the story like a fairy tale horror to serve as a metaphor for a psychoanalytic discourse. The reproduction of a schema family, the relations of filiation where the secrets and the dramas can be the base as the ruin of a family. Therefore, Aris Aster we present inheritance as a tragedy or even a curse that transmits inevitable from generation to generation. He dissects the parent-child relationship where the neuroses of some contaminating irreparably the behavior of others. The film concludes by raising the question of masculinity and its construction within the family, between affirmation, negation and injunctions social.The psychological nature of the speech, the microcosm of family and the layout image by the formalism of stylistic place the first feature ofAris Aster in an inheritance taken of Shining. The emergence by the horror film of a noted director from the first film for its ambitions of staging also recalls David Robert Mitchell and his It Follows. It is obvious that INHERITANCE registers its director in the short list of filmmakers to watch, as to know whether we can store it in the category of cult films, only time will tell.

Aurélien Milhaud

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