Film reviews: Hereditary, Studio 54 and The Happy Prince

HEREDITARY 4/5

Ari Aster isn’t a typical scaremongerer. He has no interest in gruesome torture scenes, masked psychopaths, recently discovered video tapes, jump scares, or ill-advised trips to basements with dodgy electrics.

The first-time writer-director is influenced by an older kind of film – the gritty family horror of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby the chills are put on a very slow boil. Fans of recent horror series like Insidious could find the first half hour of Hereditary excruciatingly slow.

Annie (Toni Collette) is an artist who constructs doll’s house-like dioramas of scenes of her own life. Her elderly mother Ellen has just died after spending her final days in Annie’s home and it becomes increasingly clear that the old woman had a very negative effect on her daughter’s family.

At her funeral, Annie gives a very unusual eulogy describing a “secretive, suspicious” woman with whom Annie only reconciled in the months before her death.

Later, Aster drip-feeds more information when Annie shows her own secretive side by lying to her distant shrink husband (Gabriel Byrne), and visits a grief support group instead of going to the movies.

Collette makes the most of a beautifully written speech, where Annie recounts a grisly family history of mental illness and years of emotional abuse from Ellen.

Her own daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) was Ellen’s favourite and appears to have been touched by the family curse of mental illness.

Her hobby is to make grisly toys out of bizarre objects, such as a pigeon she decapitates in the school playground with a pair of scissors.

Her son Peter (Alex Wolff) seems perhaps the most well adjusted of the bunch. He smokes drugs and rows furiously with his mother but he is, after all, a teenage boy.

Then, just as we’re settling into the rhythm of a family drama, Aster hits us with his first shock. It’s a horrible, emotionally wrenching, scene but what makes it so terrible is that it’s so unexpected.

From here, Aster takes up some of the more traditional tools of the horror filmmaker. We get a dusty book about spirituality, mysterious symbols, a seance and an appearance from Ann Dowd.

She plays Annie’s seemingly lovely new friend Joan but if you’ve seen her in The Leftovers and The Handmaid’s Tale (or remember Ruth Gordon in Rosemary’s Baby) your hackles should go up the moment she walks into frame.

In clumsier hands this is where the plot would begin to creak but it’s the way the Grahams view the supernatural through the prism of their troubled relationships that makes these old tropes so effective.

As with Peele’s Get Out, Aster can’t summon up an ending that’s worthy of his clever build-up. But there’s still a good chance he will follow Peele to the Oscars. The documentary is also enjoying something of a renaissance.

STUDIO 54, 4/5

In recent years, filmmakers have mined footage shot on smartphones and home video cameras for insight into the short lives of Amy Winehouse, Alexander McQueen and Whitney Houston.

New York superclub Studio 54 closed its doors in 1980, long before the video revolution started. After learning what went on in its darker corners, that is probably for the best.

Director Matt Tyrnauer makes the most of a few snippets of footage shot for news channels to tell the story of the celebrity haunt’s meteoric rise and dramatic fall.

He discovers that its success was as much down to what went on outside the club as what happened on the dance floor. A brutal door policy ensured there was always a huge crowd on the street for the local news crews to film.

The more ruthless the bouncers became, the more desperately people wanted to get in. Archive news footage gives us a sense of the thumping sound system and reveals the former theatre’s lavish sets.

In one delightful piece of footage, we see a healthy looking Michael Jackson boogieing away like he doesn’t have a care in the world.

Tyrnauer also sits down with Ian Schrager, one of the club’s two founders. As his flamboyant partner Steve Rubell died in 1989, it falls to this self-confessed “introvert” to take us behind the scenes.

What he reveals feels more suited to a blockbuster than a documentary. It turns out the club’s eventful 33-month reign involved levels of debauchery not seen since Caligula’s days.

Tyrnauer never shies away from asking the difficult questions, including the owners’ convictions for tax evasion and their links to the New York mafia.

And Schrager, whom you feel has waited decades to get all of this off his chest, coughs to the lot.

THE HAPPY PRINCE 3/5

It took Rupert Everett a decade to bring his Oscar Wilde movie to the cinemas.

Thankfully, all that hustling has paid off. The Happy Prince is a beautifully shot, smartly written and wonderfully performed drama about Wilde’s final years.

Everett frames his drama with Wilde’s titular story, which he tells in flashback to his own children in London and to two street urchins in Paris, where he has fled after serving a two-year sentence for “gross indecency with men” at Reading gaol.

We also get a meaty section of him bickering with his smarmy lover Bosie (an excellent Colin Morgan) in Naples and a moving scene of him being reunited with his loyal friends in Belgium, one of them touchingly played by Everett’s own loyal friend Colin Firth.