Hereditary (2018)

A mother of two is fragile after the loss of her own mother to a long illness. Her teenage son is typical, but her younger daughter is definitely on the spectrum. There's some residual guilt over the fraught relationship she had with her mom and also some fear, which doesn't seem altogether misplaced, as her mother was heavy into spiritualism.

When I read that this movie is "extremely" scary (EW) and "profoundly terrifying" (pajiba), I was IN. It'd been so long since I'd had a really good fright! As the title cards were rolling, I gripped Gary's arm in anticipation -- I felt like I was in line for a rollercoaster: no idea what was going to happen but I was excited and scared in a good way.

Sigh. It's just another supernatural, culty-type deal where one spouse is patiently annoyed with the other one and doesn't really believe there's danger even when it's clear that there is. At one point, after finding a seriously decomposed headless corpse in the attic, the husband said something like this to his wife "you're the one who dug up your mother's grave, aren't you?" That this utterance was not immediately followed by him getting himself and his kid the fuck outta dodge was just insane. I'm tired of stories that depend on unbelievably ridiculous behavior to keep the subjects in the path of danger. Wake up & get out.

C