Hereditary begins as a family drama about grief and becomes one of the most deeply unsettling horror films of the modern era. Ari Aster arrives fully formed as a filmmaker, with a visual command and a willingness to dwell in discomfort that has no equivalent in contemporary horror.

Annie Graham (Toni Collette) is a miniature artist whose estranged mother has just died. Her family, husband Steve, teenage son Peter, and young daughter Charlie, are each processing the loss differently. Charlie is the one who seems most affected. Charlie draws. Charlie makes clucking sounds with her throat. Charlie is twelve years old and thoroughly, inexplicably uncanny.

Collette gives one of the great horror performances in the film’s second half: the scene at the dinner table in which she confronts her son Peter is one of the most uncomfortable things in recent cinema, rage and grief and accusation in a face that no longer resembles itself. She received no major award nominations, which is an industry failing.

Aster’s control of tone is the film’s greatest achievement. He sustains a sense of wrongness that begins before any supernatural event and intensifies through a film that repeatedly refuses to give you what horror convention would provide. The telephone pole incident, handled in a way so abrupt and so deliberately underplayed, is a genuine shock. Not because it is gory, but because the film’s refusal to respond with conventional grief feels like the wrong note in a way that gradually reveals itself as its own kind of horror.

The ending divides audiences. It is meant to. By that point, Aster has already won.