New Horror from Old Trope.

HEREDITARY inherits its DNA from THE EXORCIST and THE OMEN. Writer-director Ari Aster’s feature film debut is a brutal masterpiece, drenched in dread, an eerie thriller about a fractured family that ends in a different genre altogether.

Movie’s opening scene is a study in creativity: camera pushes in on a room filled with paraphernalia, then focuses on a doll’s house with its front wall open, slowly pushing in to one of the rooms, which, unexpectedly and imperceptibly – becomes real: A man walks into the room and wakes the figure we notice sleeping on the bed. His first film, his first scene, Aster is flaunting his cool right outa the gate. (At this point, having seen his first two feature films, we can verify his opening impressiveness was not a fluke! Both HEREDITARY and his followup, MIDSOMMAR, are shot through with this same level of roaring creativity.)

Toni Collette is Annie, whose mother has just died. She tells husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she is “going to the movies” and secretly visits group therapy sessions, where she confesses she was never close to her mother, yet there was never closure, her mother diagnosed with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder); her uncle and brother also had schizophrenic natures. So there are demons flying about in Annie’s head long before the real ones come calling…

CASTING CALL. SEEKING: Daughter 18yo to play 13yo, introvert, socially inept, cuts the heads off dead birds with scissors. Must be one weird-lookin’ mamajama.

Steve and their teen son Peter (Alex Wolff) are not inordinately affected by Granny’s death, but their 13-year-old daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is disturbed that “no one will take care of her” now that doting Granny is gone. Charlie is pretty disturbing herself, introverted, scruffy, seeing visions of Granny beckoning from across the schoolyard—wait whaaat?? When the teacher busts her not doing her work in class, a bird outside hits the window (in a scene effective for its subtlety) and everyone in the classroom jumps and yelps in surprise – except Charlie, stone-faced. Outside, Charlie finds the bird, uses scissors to cut off its head, and attach it to a toy of hers…

You think this is disturbing? Wait a few minutes.

Peter, who is at that age where the pull of pussy is stronger than any known force in the universe except gravity, wants to borrow the car to attend a party where the girl of his lust will be abiding. Concerned mom Annie insists he take little sister Charlie. At the party, while Peter is making time with his potential cherry-popper, Charlie is eating a chocolate cake (it’s already established she has a nut allergy). When she starts going into anaphylactic shock, Peter makes a desperate drive for the hospital, Charlie in the back seat. She sticks her head out the window gasping for breath, clawing at her throat – 100 mph – a dead deer in the road – Peter swerves – a lamppost –

With a sickening THWAP!! Charlie’s head impacts the lamppost like meat and bone slammed against a wall. Which is what our simple skulls and brains are – just a bone covered in thin meat. Horrifying… as we see the head come away from the body…

And Annie thought her mother dying was a hard knock…

Here is where writer-director Aster comes into his own. Peter’s reaction, and the way it is filmed, is something we are not used to seeing in blockbuster or “Hollywood” movies. Skidded to a stop, his hands grip the wheel, his eyes staring forward; he cannot, will not, dare not believe what he suspects has happened to his sister. He tries to cast his gaze at the rearview mirror, but draws back. He sits staring ahead fearfully for minutes, before he decides… to drive back home… At this point, we have not seen anything of Charlie’s fate… In long shot, we see Peter pull into the driveway, exit the car – we are on tenterhooks, given no visuals of the back seat – up to his room, onto his bed, facing camera. Blank.

The next morning. A hard closeup of Peter’s face, blank, as we hear Annie and Steve distantly in other rooms, we hear Annie mentioning she is going out to pick up something, we hear the front door open and close… the next thing we hear is a guttural scream that will live with us forever…

And we are only halfway through this horrific journey.

 – – – – S P O I L E R S – – – – –

All through the movie, the weirdness is a slow burn, Aster crafting his visuals to always convey some measure of foreboding. He loves his long shots – one steady camera, with all the characters in the frame far away, acting out their fates while we look on almost like intruders; no cuts, no inserts, just story.

Steve gets a call that Granny’s grave has been desecrated; at a meeting, Annie meets Joan (Ann Dowd), to whom Annie opens up about her sleepwalking and how she once nearly immolated herself and her children with paint thinner; after Charlie’s death, Annie sleeps in Charlie’s treehouse instead of her marriage bed; Annie (who makes architectural models/dioramas for a living) creates a diorama of Charlie’s decapitation (which shocks husband Steve); guilt-ridden Peter starts hearing Charlie’s clicking tongue noises near him; what eventually tips the story into unbalanced is when Joan shows Annie how to conjure the spirits of the dead.

Colin Stetson’s jarring, scarring sound design is intended to disorient, to swerve us into unsure emotions, sometimes just cutting suddenly on a scene change (which in itself trips us into discomfort).

When the tale slants into demonic possession, Granny’s grand hereditary plan for the family is slowly revealed. So despite this introduction of magic-who-cares-fuck-you, Aster’s ingenious setups and payoffs create truly hair-raising moments, as Annie and Peter become subject to the whims of Joan’s cult, trying to conjure a demon named King Paimon into a male host, i.e. Peter. (We realize now why Granny always wished Charlie was a boy.) Just when we think things can’t get any more psychopathic, Annie discovers Granny’s headless body in her attic…

Stunning performances, with Toni Collette outstanding as a mother gradually tipping into madness; Byrne as her skeptical husband underplays brilliantly (one of his non-grammatical, disparaging lines toward her conjuring spell, “What language is even that?!”). Young Wolff is called upon to jump from emotion to emotion, the likes of which few humans have actually experienced (I mean, has your sister ever been decapitated? Have you ever been attacked by an invisible entity in class? Has your mother ever chased you into the attic and banged her head like a jackhammer on the door to be let in, while levitating?).

Throughout HEREDITARY’s descent into the occult, we marvel that despite the fact we’ve been suckered into a horror movie with a possession plot (an overdone trope in Hollywood), its atypical directorial choices elevate it above the engine-pit of B-stinkers. Yet for all his originality, Aster succumbs to the Hollywood trope of showing books on demonic rituals with convenient pictures – Horror Movie Shorthand For Dummies (subtitle: Picturebooks for Americans). Also, I find myself asking the obvious question that applies to ALL stories where a cult is summoning a demon into a chosen host: If the demon can already puppet its potential host to supernaturally see, do and say things before it has actually “possessed” them (and can make total strangers break the laws of physics to help its quest to possess the potential host – like levitate, walk around headless, start fires with their mind, telekinesis), then why does it even need to possess the host in the first place? To keep the paperwork in order?

The body horror begins with beheadings. And ends with horny Peter getting what he wanted – naked people on their knees, face-down ass-up worshipping him. Only problem is, those people are doughy white guys. (Now that’s horror!)

END

“Who is this ‘Ziggy’ you keep referring to?”

Moonage Daydreams of Stardust.

…Your poison doesn’t hurt me, no
Tender wine disguised in a milk-fat fair kiddie show.
I’m here to celebrate the one below
The last I heard from good God above
Was the slap on my ass by a lipstick-kissed elbow glove…”
– “The Ballad of Maxwell Demon,” Shudder To Think.

A true songwriter would give his left testicle to smackdown lyrics as creamy. And VELVET GOLDMINE – a diabolical, Bowie-esque, Wilde-ian fantasm – veritably pulsates with this species of lascivious mind-painting.

Poffy Stardust and the Vegetables from Venus

Not for the musically squeamish or 70s-phobes, the more familiar you are with David Bowie and Roxy Music, and the glam slam they were largely a part of and responsible for, the more tongue you will afford VELVET GOLDMINE. Being alive and licking during the 1970s is the best symptom for maximum sensory affinity; failing that, if your bag is Iggy Pop, T-Rex, Brian Eno, Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground (matter of fact, any glam-stroked band, from The Sweet, to Slade, Kiss, or Alice Cooper) GOLDMINE will slide into your Velvet just fine.

Written by James Lyons and Todd Haynes and directed like a wet dream gone horribly right by Haynes, starring the cyanide-intense Jonathan Rhys Meyers (as the Bowie analog, Brian Slade) and dangerously sensual Ewan McGregor (as Iggy analog, Curt Wild), GOLDMINE is a celebration of a period that was surface Pop over layered Tart, expressed through raucous colors and pungent pan-sexuality in the form of the musical idiom we now call glam rock; a story of teen alienation and decibeled angst, of clutching belief in a lifestyle that seemed like a destination but ended up merely part of a longer journey. The underlying message in GOLDMINE was espoused by Bowie himself in his prophetic Changes: “Ooh, look out, you rock n’ rollers! Pretty soon now you’re gonna get older!”

GOLDMINE’s success is in its evocation of the period – glam-struck London of the early 1970s – and its poignancy depicting the alienation of an insecure rock fan as he tries to be as Out There as the In Crowd. Around these backdrops, the larger story of the superstar elevated to messiah is woven.

Spearheading the androgynous attack on social mores is enigmatic Brian Slade aka Maxwell Demon, who fakes an onstage assassination at the height of his popularity. We follow reporter, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale), in a CITIZEN KANE-like hunt for Slade’s whereabouts a decade after his decline.

They call him the Diamond Frog.

The young Arthur (also played very convincingly by Bale) is the outcast teen who cannot assimilate into the glamster crowd he so desperately feels kinship with; finding no respite at his parents’ home either, he turns to the glitter of glam for comfort. At one point, young Arthur, while quietly watching a Slade television interview with his parents, fantasizes that he jumps up, points to Slade and shouts at his parents, “That’s me, that! That’s me!” The reality is: no matter how loud he were to shout, his parents will never hear him. From his room postered with rock idols from ceiling to floor; to the way he turntables The Ballad of Maxwell Demon album and excitedly commences reading the record jacket, to the manner in which he felt kinship yet alienation with his own kind, down to his parents being utterly unable to communicate with him, *I* felt like jumping up and yelling at the GOLDMINE screen, “That’s me, that!”

Eddie Izzard, as audacious manager, Jerry Devine, makes Brian Slade a household name and allies him with American superstar, Curt Wild, who becomes Slade’s lover, to the chagrin of Slade’s wife, Mandy (Toni Collette).

In more subtle and striking ways than can be recounted here, VELVET GOLDMINE is a homage to CITIZEN KANE (from its back and forth chronological structure; to Arthur interviewing Slade’s ex-wife in a bar and one of Slade’s acquaintances in a wheelchair), Oscar Wilde (living the lifestyle and quoting him passim, “The first duty in life is to assume a pose. What the second duty is no one yet has found out.” “Nothing makes one so vain as being told one is a sinner”), and David Bowie (whose influence extends into the very fibers of the glam mythos itself, the character of Brian Slade alluding to Bowie by his very existence, encapsulating Ziggy Stardust, The Man Who Sold the World, Diamond Dogs, Jean Genie, and even a sly dig at Bowie’s Let’s Dance era – with the name of the film itself being the title of a Bowie B-side). Wisely making the film an insular universe separate from our reality, none of those influences is mentioned explicitly – which makes the innuendoes more interesting to identify and will make the discoveries of their references all the more fascinating to young retro-glamsters.

Even Slade’s Maxwell Demon persona is a reference to physicist James Clerk Maxwell’s thought-experiment creature, which examined scenarios regarding the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And there is a further depth, which the film-makers may or may not have been aiming for: the Second Law deals with entropy – a steady state which is attained when all flow of energy has ceased. Entropy is the “world acting spontaneously to minimize potentials” – a brightly burning star like Maxwell Demon must ultimately burn out.

Once upon a future past…

GOLDMINE sears with the genius of its allusions, its opening sequences a joyous primal scream to thwart the demons of conventionality. But – like the inevitable Second Law – its energy is unsustainable. Worse – it makes a bad excuse for its entropy.

It seems more than a tad disrespectful for the film-makers to indirectly laud icons for their impact on the music industry and then make the filmic counterparts of those icons suffer formulaic dramatic arcs of washed-up, burnt-out fates, rather than allow the counterparts the popularity and longevity that the real-life icons enjoy to this day.

Brian Slade is undone by his excesses, and made to endure a Jilted Wife scene straight out of The Actor’s Studio, wherein his pan-sexual spouse suddenly turns on a plot convenience into Mrs. Conservative, simply to comply with the MPAA Hays Code that no excessive behavior shall go unreconciled. She shrikes at him, “You know what your problem is? You get what you want and do what you will.”

Not really a problem, per se. Which proves conclusively that whenever someone deigns to tell you your problems, the most sensible option is to ignore them.

Love everyone. In various positions.

These pitfalls of rock superstardom were wholly unnecessary, only pandering to “normal” people who believe erroneously that success is a harsh mistress. Or maybe just a bitch. A prime example of excess engendering success and longevity and industry clout is the man without whom this movie could never have been made – David Bowie.

Yes, we must all eventually relinquish the “dreams of youth” – but in the rock idiom that does NOT mean relinquishing money and chicks and drugs and pan-sexuality, rather the irresponsibility that those aspects generate. The zenith of success is reconciling all the so-called “excess” elements with your business interests. Once you ensure your income blacks out your expenses, you become a Business Model, a product. Like David Bowie. Like Iggy Pop. Like Roxy Music. Whether you neglect your spouse or spend your nights snorting coke from the butt of a black man in a Mozart wig is irrelevant.

In order to insert these negative messages, the film becomes overlong. (Damn you, MPAA!) Yet VELVET GOLDMINE somehow redeems its negativity by having Arthur discover that Slade’s secret was not that he relinquished his success at all – just his space-messiah persona – swapping his serpentine sensuality for a more sterile, adult-oriented Business Model. In its final scenes, we find the film has been paying attention to its real life analogs and tips its hat one last time to David Bowie, the Grand Master of Reinvention.

END