Hereditary

Ari Aster has named it among the films he was working from, and the structure is the same trick: a family tragedy that the audience explains psychologically for most of the running time, and a final scene that says the coven was real and organised all of it. Both films spend their length letting you believe the woman at the centre is unwell, then reveal she was the only one paying attention. Both end with a coronation rather than an escape.

Both films are about a mother watching her child become someone else, and both refuse to let her be believed until the last act. Aster has cited The Exorcist among the possession films he was working against, and the inheritance is visible in the shape: a domestic drama played straight for an hour, a medical or rational explanation offered and exhausted, and only then the admission that the supernatural reading was the correct one. Filed MEDIUM. The lineage is real and the grief-first structure is genuinely Aster's own; what he takes is permission to spend an hour on a family before anything happens.