With all due respect to the wildly entertaining A Quiet Place, the year’s best horror movie isn’t out yet. Hereditary — which comes from the same producer as The Witch: A New-England Folktale — is terrifying, unnerving, and filled with creeping dread. It’s really, really good, and as you can see in the trailer above, a great showcase for Milly Shapiro. The young actress plays Charlie, a.k.a. the clicking girl, whose passions include being unaffected by birds smashing into windows and making everyone around her feel uncomfortable, especially her mom (played by a never-better Toni Collette).
Move over, Damien: Charlie is horror’s next great sinister-seeming kid.
Here’s the official plot synopsis.
When Ellen, the matriarch of the Graham family, passes away, her daughter’s family begins to unravel cryptic and increasingly terrifying secrets about their ancestry. The more they discover, the more they find themselves trying to outrun the sinister fate they seem to have inherited. Making his feature debut, writer-director Ari Aster unleashes a nightmare vision of a domestic breakdown that exhibits the craft and precision of a nascent auteur, transforming a familial tragedy into something ominous and deeply disquieting, and pushing the horror movie into chilling new terrain with its shattering portrait of heritage gone to hell.
Hereditary opens on June 8.
