Hereditary

A miasma of menace engulfs an unsuspecting American family when a fearful legacy comes home to roost in this terrific tale of terror. Following the death of the reclusive mother of miniaturist model-maker Annie Graham (Toni Collette), Annie's husband (Gabriel Byrne) and two children (Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro) find themselves beset by all sorts of unnerving weirdness - birds crashing into windows, ethereal apparitions, a desecrated grave, alarming premonitions - but that is only the start of the nightmare. In an audacious slow-burn horror, the Grahams' spacious hillside house - assiduously, almost ghoulishly, reproduced by Annie in her workroom - becomes as much a character as the frazzled and fraught quartet within. The cast is first-rate, with Collette just marvellous as the incumbent matriarch, agonisingly switching between grieving and screaming at any given moment. Though hailed as a 21st-century successor to The Exorcist, director Ari Aster's scintillating debut is more akin to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, with a precision-tooled, dread-inducing atmosphere that refuses to loosen its grip.