One of the best emerging directors of the current generation is the mind behind the brilliantly terrifying horrific drama Hereditary. Ari Aster's first feature-length film came out in June of 2018, and it was one of the first movies within the new wave of horror that began in the mid 2010s that combined supernatural elements with horrific imagery with a story more meaningful than a group of teenagers getting murdered. The story is actually quite sad, and it unleashes the very real horrors of everyday life like mental illness, depression, death, and family. But what exactly did the fictional Graham family inherit, and was there any hope for the family to have free will, or were they always destined to live the life Annie's mother set into motion?
Few horror films have been able to capture an audience from beginning to end and cause the viewer to spiral downwards into an endless black hole of philosophical and psychological questions like Hereditary has. If anyone has ever taken a look at any of the theories about movies like The Shining or It Follows, or even Coraline, they know exactly what this means. Right from the opening shots of Hereditary, there is the sense that this family is very small and insignificant in a larger, more grand story. The camera pans around a room and then zooms into a miniature dollhouse replica of the actual home. This suggests that the Graham family is being watched and controlled by greater forces which they are powerless to stop.
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Annie's mother has recently just passed, and because she and her mother were estranged from one another, Annie is not quite sure how to feel about the situation. This is also why she has a hard time going through her mother's things—a decision that will have deadly consequences later since she was not able to discover her mother's past by looking at her belongings in time. Every scene in the first act of the film is used to show how closed off from one another the Graham family is. They each stay compartmentalized in their rooms and rarely are seen together. When they are together, it's usually not a pleasant conversation. So when strange things start happening, the family cannot protect themselves since they haven't been communicating.
The cult Annie's mother Ellen was in uses this to their advantage. The cult has manipulated every event of each family member's life so far, which means the Grahams never truly had a choice in their own future. The Graham family has been cursed by a demon passed down through generations. And when Ellen dies, Annie inherits the demon, who she passes on to her children. The cult's goal is to have a young male host to put the demon Paimon into. It is heavily implied that not only did the character Joan's grandson die as a result of the cult trying to use him for their ritual, but so did Annie's own brother and father. The father died from starvation and the brother hung himself in their mother's room and blamed Ellen for trying to put people inside him.
It is also revealed that Annie once almost killed her children by setting them on fire with paint thinner while sleepwalking. Is this because she subconsciously knew some of her mother's secrets and was trying to save herself and children from a far worse fate? Each family member is slowly succumbing to their grief and depression. They cannot accept the events that have happened because they feel as if they had no control over them happening. Not only has Annie and her children inherited a sinister demon, but they have also inherited the mental illness that runs in their bloodline through both genetic and environmental factors.
Because of the family's inability to deal with emotions, Peter becomes deeply depressed after what happens to his sister. Because he has been weakened mentally, Peter is able to be taken advantage of and inhabited by Paimon. Annie never wanted to be a mother (a secret she reveals to the audience through a dream). She feared that she would pass on her mental illnesses and project them onto her own children, but maybe also subconsciously feared what her mother would do to her children if she were to have them. This is why Annie instinctively knew to keep Ellen away from Peter when he was born.
Ellen most likely only had children to fulfill her desire to summon Paimon—something the cult has been trying to do for years. Because of this, Annie would have been unloved, neglected, and abused. This would later teach Annie how to interact with her own children in a vicious cycle of toxicity and violence. Annie's career as a miniaturist is therapeutic in nature, as each work created depicts a traumatic moment in Annie's life that she hasn't been able to deal with. Hereditary is scary because it shows how many things beyond our control are inherited by family, and whether these things are good or evil doesn't matter, because they will happen no matter what.
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