Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018)

Milly Shapiro, Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, and Alex Wolff in Hereditary

Cast: Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Woff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Mallory Bechtel. Screenplay: Ari Aster. Cinematography: Pawel Pogorzelski. Production design: Grace Yun. Film editing: Lucian Johnston, Jennifer Lame. Music: Colin Stetson.

There are films that leave a depressive miasma with me for days. I'm thinking particularly of George Sluizer's The Vanishing (1988, not the 1993 American remake) and Michael Haneke's Funny Games (1997, not the 2007 American remake). For a time, I thought Ari Aster's Hereditary was going to have the same effect on me, and it might have, if it hadn't devolved into a mere gory supernatural thriller with an overcomplicated backstory. It begins extraordinarily and creepily well, with a pan through the miniatures created by Annie (Toni Collette) in which one of them turns into the actual room where her son, Peter (Alex Wolff), is oversleeping on the day of his grandmother's funeral. A menacing gloom remains in the film as the family, including father Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro), goes to the funeral and returns home. Even when we come home, there's a sense that something is off about the family and their obvious mixed feelings about the deceased. Ari Aster, in his feature film debut, skillfully handles the atmosphere in the somewhat sinister old house (aided by Pawel Pogorzelski's dark but not too dark cinematography and Colin Stetson's ominous score). Aster manages to gradually introduce the exposition about what's eating at Annie and her family. The performances are marvelous, especially Shapiro's obviously but enigmatically disturbed 13-year-old Charlie. I was with Aster's film all the way through the appalling accident that turns the story in a new direction. Then Ann Dowd, a fine actress whose career seems to have become defined by her performance as Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale, shows up to reveal the movie's indebtedness to The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) and Rosemary's Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Unfortunately, Aster's film has neither the coherence of the former nor the wit of the latter. In the end, it has to be remembered for Collette's performance, which should have had an Oscar nomination, not just for Annie's distraught moments but also the one at the film's climax when her face turns from horror to a kind of pleased amazement.

Captain Fantastic (Matt Ross, 2016)

Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic

Ben: Viggo Mortensen
Bodevan: George MacKay
Kielyr: Samanta Isler
Vespyr: Annalise Basso
Rellian: Nicholas Hamilton
Zaja: Shree Crooks
Nai: Charlie Shotwell
Harper: Kathryn Hahn
Dave: Steve Zahn
Jack: Frank Langella
Abigail: Ann Dowd
Leslie: Trin Miller

Director: Matt Ross
Screenplay: Matt Ross
Cinematography: Stéphane Fontaine
Production design: Russell Barnes
Film editing: Joseph Krings
Music: Alex Somers

From Woodstock to Mar-a-Lago, the terminus a quo and terminus ad quem of the Baby Boom generation. Or, as Matt Ross's Captain Fantastic would have it, from an off-the-grid cabin in the mountains to an opulent mansion beside a golf course. That, anyway, is how the film symbolizes the spiritual schism of the late 20th and early 21st century. It's a schism that manifests itself in the bipolar disorder of Leslie Cash, whom we see only in the visions of her husband, Ben, and in her casket. Anchored by yet another fine performance by Viggo Mortensen as Ben, the film risks becoming over-formulaic, especially in the big confrontation scene in which Ben pits his world view against that of Leslie's father at her funeral. The father is played by Frank Langella, who is an actor skilled at taking potentially one-note roles and adding the appoggiaturas they need to become interesting, so that even when world views collide in Captain Fantastic, we're not left to pick mere feel-good leftism out of the rubble. Ben and Leslie have tried to raise their six children uncontaminated by corporate capitalism, but the effort seems to have been too much for her -- after a breakdown, she is hospitalized and Ben carries on without her until her suicide forces him to take the precocious, home-schooled kids out into the world they never made. Ben can't resist showing them off, of course. At his sister's house he queries his teenage nephews about the Bill of Rights: The younger one thinks it has to do with what people are asked to pay for stuff, and the older knows vaguely that it has something to do with the government. So Ben marches out 8-year-old Zaja, who first starts by quoting it and is then prompted to articulate its significance, which she does superbly. But such encounters only emphasize how unprepared the kids are for anything but their own closed society. They may know the mechanics of sexuality, for example, but as the oldest son, Bodevan, discovers when he encounters a hot-to-trot teenage girl in a trailer park, they're unprepared for the real-world applications. There is, of course, no easy resolution for this culture clash, and Ross is forced into an ending that feels forced and compromised. Still, the performances of Mortensen, Langella, Kathryn Hahn, Steve Zahn, Ann Dowd, and especially the young actors playing the Cash family, make Captain Fantastic work as well as it could have.