Director Ivan Kavangh seemed like a name to keep in mind after his very gloomy ‘The Canal’ (2014), in which he was a few years ahead of the findings of ‘Hereditary’ (2018), but suddenly disappeared and quite a few years have passed before returning to the supernatural terrain with ‘Heir’ (Son, 2021), a small but powerful horror film that went somewhat unnoticed last year, but now premieres on Filmin in a valley of genre premieres that benefits it.
The director’s previous film, ‘land of violence‘ (Never Grow Old, 2019), was a dark western with realistic textures that indicated a greater projection in his work, and with the latter he achieves a visual finish with nothing to envy to studio productions. The location choices and decrepit interiors of the production design of John Leslie are collected with gloomy nuances by the photography of Piers McGrailso seeing it released directly on streaming does not do it justice.
‘Heir’ begins with a tense prologue in which a pregnant young woman fleeing from her pursuers ends up giving birth alone in a car. After a jump of a few years we meet Laura, played by the actress from the new ‘Halloween’, Andi Matichak, an elementary school teacher who lives quietly in a small town with her 8-year-old son David (Luke David Blumm). One night she sees a whole group of people gathered around her bed, but when she looks for help, they are gone and although the child is unharmed and she does not remember anything apparently.
race with the devil
Local Cops Steve (Cranston Johnson) and Paul (Emile Hirsch) don’t believe her, as there are no signs of forced entry or strange fingerprints, but they soon discover that the young mother has been living under an assumed name after surviving a horrible past, when the boy falls gravely ill and Laura reveals to the more sympathetic Paul who had escaped from a cult and fears that they will return to look for her and her son.
So far everything works like a dark version of movies dealing with post-traumatic stress in cult survivorslike ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’ (2011) or ‘Regression’ (2015), however, this is only the beginning and the protagonist’s nightmare leads to paranoia in which the walls seem to listen, so she ends up fleeing from his apparent pursuers once again, and together with his son he drives through the darkest corners of Kansas, Mississippi and other places where he ends up hiding and looking for allies.
The psychological thriller angle on the trauma of ‘Heir’ takes the form of an effective supernatural horror road movie about dysfunctional motherhood that swings between ‘Midnight Special’ (2016) and the recent ‘The Encounter’ (Encounter, 2021), however, when David’s illness generates some rather grotesque needs, things begin to take a path more similar to ‘BabyBlood‘(1990).
One of the best horror premieres of the semester
In a similar way to ‘The Canal’, Kavanagh maintains the uncertainty of whether our protagonist is beset by a supernatural danger or a delusional psychosis, but there are many details of explicit horror that move the whole towards certainty and does not maintain a harmonic balance between all its elements, but this is not an evil in itself, since ‘Heir’ doesn’t play all the mystery either but leaves room for the decadent atmosphere with a pessimistic residue that takes over the whole.
The movie plays on common places of satanic cinema and children “with surprise” of which we will see in the next series ‘The Baby’, but it neither cuts the gore nor turns its back on the bad vibes necessary to surf near the cinema with esoteric cannibalism, body horror, minds on the verge of collapse and even flashbacks of sects that leave a mark on the protagonist similar to that of ‘The sinister cabin’ (The Lodge, 2019), but as if she were in ‘Eyes of fire’ (Firestarter, 1984).
‘Heir’ will be familiar to fans of the genre with some films behind them, but despite its lack of originality, it is much better than its lukewarm impact at festivals like Sitges might lead one to think. With a robust rhythm and generous truculence, this modern update of ‘La nun posída’ (To the Devil a Daughter, 1976) is above the average of streaming releases this year and should not go unnoticed until 2022 horror highlights arrive like ‘X’, ‘Nope!’ or ‘Men’.