Saw this last night, and as a fan of
most things horror-related, I wasn't very impressed. While the acting was really good, the plot didn't make that much sense, especially towards the end when it was piling on the horror theatrics. The movie was also thematically and tonally inconsistent - it started out a lot like James Wan's Conjuring-verse movies, with some similarities to last year's Annabelle Creation in particular (anyone who's seen that movie will know what I'm talking about). But rather than establish a discrete supernatural force/entity early on, like James Wan's movies have usually done, Hereditary felt more like a pyschological drama for about the first two-thirds of the movie, and didn't firmly establish any supernatural forces for most of the runtime - i.e., the people in the movie could've just as easily been passed off as crazy or pyschotic, rather than possessed, and everything still would've fit within the context. It felt more like a creepy/disturbing family drama than a Wan-style "there's an actual demon in this house and we need religious help!" kind of movie.
It was ok for a horror movie, and not terrible, but there were a ton of elements, whether stylistic, thematic, visual, or plot-related, borrowing from other horror movies from the past 10 years or so. Stylistically, it was a lot like James Wan's Conjuring-verse movies. Thematically, it reminded me mostly of The Babadook, Sinister, and The Witch. And the visuals and plot reminded me of two Mike Flanagan movies (Oculus and Ouija: Origin of Evil). For that reason, I think the horror fans who have been watching most of the movies from this decade will probably feel that Hereditary isn't really that original, when it pulls so much from fairly-recent movies.
I definitely think if you're going expecting a genuine supernatural horror movie, as I was, prepare to be a bit disappointed. Otherwise, it is pretty good (and effective) as a creepy/disturbing family drama. Or you might just hate it anyway - on my way out, I heard a guy say to his girlfriend (or could've been his wife) "I hated every minute of it".
Also, for what was supposed to be a horror movie in general, it felt weirdly disingenuous, and there were more than a few times throughout the movie where it felt like the characters were just crazy or psychoticsort of like in that the movie wanted to be horror but didn't quite go the right way about it and didn't have the right atmosphere, and the characters came across more as psychotic people than anything else. For example, the ending scene in the treehouse: [blackout]Clearly there was supposed to be a demon there, but something about the scene made it feel like all of the people in there were just plain nuts and not actually possessed by any demons[/blackout]
Not going back to that chain in a hurry.
