★★★★★

SO much of this insidiously terrifying, skin-crawling horror is about family. The idea that you can’t pick ‘em, that you’re stuck with them like it or lump it. That the eternal bond you feel can often be clawed away at by the fear of what may have been passed on to you or, indeed, what you may pass on through genes or simply how you act around them.

We’re invited into the film’s world via a miniature view as the camera zooms in on the room of a model house that fills the screen. It’s the remote woodland home of Annie (Toni Colette), a mother-of-two whose own mother has just died. She’s left feeling torn apart by her guilt over the fractured relationship they had.

She is struggling desperately to cope, despite keeping busy and with the support from her loving psychiatrist husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne). There’s also the ever-present need to protect teenage son Peter (Alex Wolff), who seems to bear her ill will, and behaviourally unique younger daughter Charlie (extraordinary newcomer Milly Shapiro).

As she begins to uncover cryptic and disturbing hidden secrets about her family ancestry that seem to be quite literally haunting her daily life, she is approached by a mysterious, also bereaved woman (Ann Dowd) offering answers.

With his debut feature film, Ari Aster immediately proves himself a deft hand at disorientating his audience, conjuring a quite remarkable piece of unsettling, genuinely nightmarish cinema.

It masterfully preys on perception and imagination with shrewd use of framing and shadows to trick you into doubting what you’re seeing is really there.

Then there’s the sound, which grips you like a vice with its mixture of relentlessly pulsating humming in the background, elongated violin strings and barely classifiable noises that, much like Jonathan Glazer’s atmospherically similar Under the Skin, almost feels not of this world.

Using the traditional creaky old house as the stage on which Aster unfolds his particular vision of horror, this is a prime example of how to marry the classical and the modern into a concoction that feels both eerily familiar and unsettlingly unpredictable.

There’s also great love and attention gone into the depicting of a family and the idea of not being able to control trauma (physical, mental or emotional) suddenly thrust upon you which then impacts on your loved ones. Collette is the anchor and she gives nothing short of an extraordinary performance, straddling in beautifully disquieting fashion the line between the fearful and the feared.

Like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Shining and The Babadook before it, Hereditary ties its emotional resonance surrounding parental love and behavioural inheritance to its escalating puzzle box of mysteries, fears and blurred lines between the psychological and the supernatural. It all culminates in a hair-raising finale that’s sure to split audiences.

For those who like their scary movies set at a studious slow-build, more interested in crushing atmosphere than jump scares and set to the tune of some seriously disturbing imagery, this is prestige ordeal horror filmmaking that dares, provokes and gets under your skin with scalpel sharp precision. I felt unsafe watching it; I can think of no higher bar for a horror to reach. Undoubtedly one of the films to beat this year.