L’horreur de Hérédité : une mise en scène de l’inquiétant « familial »

Abstract

Hereditary, Ari Aster’s first feature film, displays from the outset a generic hybridity making its ambivalent identity manifest. This ambivalence is central to Freud’s uncanny, and beyond the director’s self-confessed ambition to convey this feeling, the theme of the family is treated here as a paradigmatic incarnation of the Freudian concept. Playing with interlocked and artificial spaces, the opening sequence already introduces the motifs of duplicates and fatality: these decisive mechanisms of the uncanny betray Hereditary’s whole project, narratively and formally permeating the film from extradiegetic quotes to its very structure. Through the tragic metaphor – merging the house and the ancient « clan », the family occupying it – we’re led to investigate the film’s subordination of its domestic, liminal or interlocked spaces in the mise-en-scène of a repressed « familial uncanny » resurfacing in the Graham’s collective psyche. On formal and symbolic levels, Hereditary eventually comes full-circle in a trajectory that not only mimics the Freudian uncanny’s dialectic, but looks back toward its own generic heredity as well.

Keywords

• horror
• family
• unheimlich
• uncanny
• ambivalence
• doubles