I know. Even the phrase “jumped the shark” has jumped the shark. Nonetheless it is unquestionable that the Toni Collette horror film Hereditary jumped it, with abandon. With about ten convoluted minutes remaining, the writers’ creative juices ran out, exposing a dry lake-bed of formula which the acting had up-to-then concealed.
For almost two hours, we enjoyed (if that is the right word) a very well-acted, suspenseful film. But around the 1:55 mark, right after Collette got a sickened look on her face — as if her brain wanted to vomit — this smoldering-on-the-launch-pad thriller misfired and fell on its side, sending sparks one way and fear the other, but not much of substance in the direction of the viewer. The film’s nearly-last gasp (spoiler and pun-alert) was Collette’s self-beheading, after she somehow hanged herself from the attic ceiling after she somehow chased her son into said attic, the better for him to observe her gruesome deed, we surmise, so to inspire his leap into the arms of death, taking the very promise/premise of the story along with him.
The final minutes of the film reminded me of some of the inexplicable endings to songs on the Beatles’ so-called White Album. There was Glass Onion, a rocker that abruptly ended with a George Martin cello dirge inartfully tacked-on; and Cry Baby Cry, a wistful poetic Lennon tune onto which someone (let’s blame Paul) thought it would be proper to append McCartney’s haunted ramble Can You Take Me Back; and the album itself ended with one of the top-three shlocky Beatles’ songs of all time, Ringo’s Good Night, which mopped up the shards from the avant-garde train-wreck called Revolution 9.
The Beatles’ bad endings will be remembered longer and regretted more deeply than the one that the producers of Heriditary indulgently grafted onto the end of their film. Still. What was that about?
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