How a Viewpoint Sleight-of-Hand Yields a Wealth of New Perspective on the Destruction of a Model Family

by Hunter Bush

Ari Aster's recent sophomore feature Midsommar has been a big deal in film talk circles recently, but his previous film, last year's Hereditary, is what put him on most people's radar. A film dealing with family and grief (Aster's topics of choice) through the supernatural chicanery of a witchy cult, Hereditary is most definitely when all's said and done, a Bad Moms movie. What I posit today is that there is a way to view the events depicted in the film that makes it, somehow, an Even Worse Moms movie.

Also, heads up, I will have to outright RUIN Hereditary for you if you haven't seen it.

Hereditary is about the dissolution and eventual destruction of the Graham family. After high schooler daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is beheaded in an auto accident, mom Annie (Toni Collette) (already on a slippery mental slope), dad Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and son Peter (Alex Wolff) all begin to fall apart in their own ways. By the time the end credits roll, we've learned that all that misery, trauma and grief was engineered by grandmother Ellen Leigh to serve in securing a viable host for the spirit of the demon Paimon.

Throughout the film we get breadcrumbs of the turbulent history between Annie and her mother Ellen Leigh. Annie's brother, for whom Charlie is named, hanged himself in their mother's bedroom when he was sixteen (he is mentioned as being schizophrenic, according to Annie). Her father also died, of starvation apparently. Annie says he had psychotic depression. In hindsight, these things seem to be signifiers of the cult's objective. It's stated that Paimon prefers a male host. So when Annie recalls her brother's suicide note saying Ellen Leigh was trying to "put people inside him", that seems to suggest he was being groomed, for lack of a better word, to be Paimon's host and resorted to suicide to save himself from that fate. Granted there's a lot of non-textual assumptions at work here, but the same logic opens up interesting avenues of thought about Annie's father. Did he fear being poisoned and starve himself or was he somehow a captive? No more information is given, but post-viewing analysis all but demands you consider his fate.

She is shown in photographs to be a central figure within the cult and is referred to by members as "Queen Leigh". It's unclear for exactly how long, but it seems her goal was to curry favor with the demon and earn herself and her fellow worshipers untold wealth. So the whole thing seems to be Queen Leigh's doing. Thing is, she's dead before the film even begins. It actually opens with the text of her obituary before we see the family hurrying to make it to her funeral on time. So everything we learn about her is apocryphal at best. If this information could be trusted, Ellen Leigh would, without a doubt, qualify as a Bad Mom. If.

Most of what we learn in Hereditary comes from Annie, who could at best be described as an unreliable narrator. Even within the text of the movie she has dealt with bouts of unreality. We hear about one notable instance of hallucinatory sleepwalking (taking place before the events of the film) that ended with her dousing herself and her children in paint thinner and trying to strike a match before being awoken. We see one sleepwalking incident ourselves and believe we are seeing another before realizing it to be a dream. These shifting planes of reality become hazier as events in the Graham household drift further and further from a familiar reality and I think that is not so much a stylistic, directorial choice from Ari Aster as much as it is a clue. The fact that reality is becoming murky is not only representative of Annie's point of view, it IS Annie's point of view.

Annie is a working artist, who designs and builds scale models as both her artistic output and a source of income. There are examples of her works throughout the Graham house, notably a 4 or 5 foot high sculpture of a house built on the land covering another house, itself built on yet another more deeply buried one. She also has a workshop where she is currently creating pieces for an upcoming gallery show, based on locations seen in the film including her children's school and the family's home.

At one point, after Charlie's death, Steve enters Annie's workshop to tell her dinner is ready and finds Annie composing a model of the accident site, from just after it happened, complete with representations of her son behind the wheel and her daughter's severed head lying by the side of the road. This was something Annie had not seen, the accident having happened at night and Annie not knowing Charlie had died until the following morning. That means this scene is something Annie is summoning from her mind's eye. When Steve sees this macabre diorama, Annie insists it's "a neutral view of the accident" and "not about blaming anyone" before going down to dinner and doing just that, telling Peter that "because of what (he) did, (his) sister is dead", reinforcing that we can't actually take her at her word.

The fact that this perspective on the accident site, though unobserved by Annie, is eerily close to what we as the audience saw is a further clue that when we witness events within the film, we aren't seeing an objective reality, but Annie's reality. In fact, the opening shot of the film, after Ellen Leigh's obituary text fades, is a pan across Annie's workshop into the model of their home into Peter's bedroom which ceases to be a model and becomes reality as Steve walks in to wake Peter for the funeral. The model becomes our reality and, therefore, the model maker's perspective is now ours for the entire duration. We are seeing through the mind's eye of the true Bad Mom.

Even the way Annie's eventual death is depicted supports this idea through film language. Traditionally in film, what you see is what you get. The old adage of "show, don't tell" comes from the belief that audiences won't believe something unless they see it with their own eyes (and won't enjoy it as much besides). Of course this has been subverted almost as often as enforced but that's the way art is: you've gotta know the rules to break the rules, and Ari Aster knows the rules. So when Annie's possessed body is hovering in the attic roof peak, sawing her own head off with a piano wire, she doesn't die until Peter dives out the window. We only hear the sawing stop and the body thud to the floor while looking at Peter lying in the dirt. We're being told (not shown) as a hint that this event isn't to be trusted as concrete reality.

Throughout the film, despite the supernatural constantly hovering at the fringes of the story, it only ever fully presents itself through or around Annie. Which makes sense. This is her reality, so of course she is a central character to what happens in it. Only Tommy Westphall from St. Elsewhere would create such a detailed and realistic mental universe to play only the tiniest part in it. So it can be reasoned that whenever Annie isn't shown to be physically present these are how she is "neutrally viewing" (re: imagining) events.

The natural assumption then would be that all of Hereditary could be described as an imaginary tale, the non-reality of a woman justifying the imperfect relationship that she'd had with her mother in the wake of the mother's death, or just dealing with her own grief after losing a child. The fictionalized, literalized destruction of her family. I think that particular read, were it true, would rob the film of its emotional weight and impact and to that end, I believe the final shot of the film argues against it.

In the finale, Peter reawakens on the ground outside the house, now possessed by Charlie's spirit, and follows Annie's floating headless body into the treehouse to find the cult of Paimon gathered around an altar to Charlie. Ellen Leigh's headless, decomposing body, as well as Annie's only freshly deceased one, posed on the floor at the effigy's feet. As the cultists chant in worship, the camera pulls back and back and back mimicking the push in from the film's opening, but never actually becoming a model. Because there is no reality to fully retreat to. These are real events, filtered through the viewpoint of a grieving, mentally ill woman. That implies that these events happened in some form or other, just without any overarching spooky justification.

In the final act of the film, Annie is shown how to perform a seance and summon Charlie's spirit, which she does (off screen) at home before waking Steve and Peter and performing the ceremony again. Steve and Peter are, understandably, freaked out but also seem not to believe all of what they see. The next day at school, Peter is possessed by an unseen force which he describes as "a vengeful spirit", smashing his face onto his desk, breaking his nose. He is released into Steve's care and sent home early. Convinced that Charlie's old sketchbook (used in the seance) needs to be destroyed to protect her family, Annie enlists Steve to burn it in the fireplace.

Because of an earlier attempt, she believes that she and the book are linked and that she will also burn. Steve, for his part, believes that his wife is having a massive breakdown. Having just come from finding Ellen Leigh's rotting corpse in their attic and believing Annie is responsible, Steve is, understandably, hesitant to play along with her diary burning scenario. But, when Annie takes the book from him and throws it in herself, it isn't she, but Steve who bursts into flames and dies.

Perhaps these events happened, but without the aid of supernatural forces. Perhaps Steve and Peter were awoken in the middle of the night by their wild-eyed wife / mother and taken to a freezing cold living room seance. Their disbelief in the face of what is portrayed as a successful seance makes more sense if it's truly only successful in Annie's mind. Perhaps Steve was ultimately correct and it was Annie who'd desecrated her mother's gravesite and mutilated her corpse all in the service of a cultist narrative that existed only in her own head. Most horrific, perhaps Steve's immolation had nothing to do with demonic possession and was the result of his wife's penchant for paint thinner. It should be noted that where he catches fire and where his body later lies are very different locations, which could be another clue.

I should mention here that I don't think there are "right" or "wrong" ways to view movies, only different ones. You can choose to view Hereditary in such a way that Ellen Leigh is at the heart of events, even after her death; the story of a woman so obsessed with wealth and prestige that she was willing to sacrifice her immediate family and her daughter's family to get it. Alternately, as I've outlined here, you can choose to view it all as Annie's doing; the somehow even more chilling annihilation of her family, filtered through her own fractured, fatalistic lens. Either way: you're right and either way Hereditary is unquestionably a Bad Moms movie.