Hereditary

You reap what they've sown. [Ari Aster Rewatch: 1 of 4] It is pretty telling that the most terrifying scene is the unparalleled dread of witnessing a mother finding the headless body of her daughter in the backseat when going for a grocery run. If they had remembered the EpiPen, if Peter hadn’t smoked, if Annie hadn’t insisted upon Charlie going. An avoidable tragedy. However. Aster denies this comfort by rigorously constructing a dilemma of responsibility, which ultimately turns out to be the figurative red herring of the entire narrative. No choice, no deviation from the path, would have made any difference, as Annie will not escape the misfortune her mother (and perhaps generations of mothers before her) has brought upon their descendants. While you can easily get lost in the satanic texts of The Lesser Key of Solomon, something that stood out to me was how, in Greek mythology, Iphigenia, daughter of King Agamemnon, was sacrificed for the favour of the gods... sometimes. Just as Iphigenia’s fate wavers between sacrifice and salvation depending on who’s telling the myth, Aster exposes a world where all routes lead to the same doom. For the full runtime, Hereditary respects the audience's intelligence, surgically tearing apart what makes horror work on the screen until the only thing that's left is a nuclear family and the worst thing that could ever happen to them. Being watched & played with. In their little cardboard house.