Man, that was brilliant! Really tense. Not quite as good, but very similar to The Witch in some of it's themes.
I thought so too, but I liked this better. I loved that they did the same kind of thing at the end - just "yeah, this is what was behind it all, because it's a movie and magic works". I thought Hereditary took it to a delicious new level, though, letting the warped comedy really spill through in the final minutes. It reminded me of the movie "Mum & Dad", and the Christmas party scene. I saw it this weekend, and thought it started out really good. Charlie was brilliantly handled, for the reasons articulated above. It scored an immediate extra star to have that old trope decapitated. And as people have also already said, the execution and deployment of scares was excellent. Toni Collette brilliant as ever. The kids were alright, Gabriel Byrne good but maybe a bit too quiet?
The problem was Ann Dowd, of course. The second I saw her face in the crowd, I knew what kind of twist would likely be coming (no, I didn't know she was in it until she appeared). Not only is she typecast (The Remnant? Gilead? Hello?), her character is predictable enough as it is. That said, the movie
could have gone for another twist with her (which I might even have been subconsciously expecting) so the photo album reveal still worked pretty well. It did get a little resolution-by-numbers for a few scenes, but as I said, I enjoyed the bizarre, over-the-top finale.
The old-school scary renaissance has been going on for a few years now, and I feel as if this combined the best lessons from that genre with a few splashes of extreme gore for the more carnivorous viewers. You can do a lot with just a figure appearing in a dark room, or a shadow flying overhead, but there's something to be said for the severed head too. It's not a perfect horror film, but it's better than any of the Insidious sequels and imitators I've seen (which is not that many, to be fair). Two thumbs up Charlie's trachea, to make her tell rude jokes over the credits.