Why is ‘Hereditary’ a hit with critics, but an audience flop?

Milly Shapiro, left, and Toni Collette are featured in the divisive “Hereditary.” (A24 )

The report cards are in, and the critically lauded “Hereditary” is one letter grade away from having failed the average American moviegoer.

The American moviegoer apparently expected a different/scarier/better horror movie than this one. Are the critics who admired it just a bunch of buttheads? Are multiplex audiences too jaded to appreciate its bizarre atmospheric tension?

This year’s Sundance Film Festival hit stars Toni Collette as a mother crazed with grief and plagued with family secrets. As compiled by CinemaScore, the exit-polling firm in the business of quantifying “movie appeal” among opening-night audiences, reactions to writer-director Ari Aster’s brooding creep-out averaged out to a D+ score.

It’s not “Avengers: Infinity War” (grade A), in other words. For comparison, Darren Aronofsky’s mind-bender “Mother!” garnered a rare F score.

One of my favorite horror films of recent years, the early New England-set supernatural tale “The Witch,” received a telling C-. Why “telling”? Because a C- tells the distributor that things will be dropping off quickly, box office-wise.

With “The Witch,” I was so firmly in writer-director Robert Eggers’ grip that I didn’t think twice about whether anybody would love the movie like I did. Most didn’t, especially those who felt tricked by the trailers into thinking “The Witch” was a Puritan thrill ride.

The same is true of “Hereditary.” The marketing sells it, but it’s too wormy and clammy to offer audiences a rousing catharsis.

Distributed by A24, “The Witch” and “Hereditary” share traits that may shed light on those discouraging exit-poll grades. They’re both believers in developing their stories gradually. They’re less about relentless jump scares and more about psychological ordeals. They’re both destabilizing and willfully disorienting in ways that don’t appeal to the “Saw” and “Hostel” champions.

As I hear from various readers and colleagues who did not like “Hereditary,” I’ll offer these thoughts as to why audiences balked at the film:

1. The movie’s hard on its characters. The suffering in “Hereditary” is multidirectional and relentless. The “kills” aren’t fun, or entertaining gross-outs.

2. Where the story goes frustrates a lot of people. It goes to a place I won’t spell out, except to say comparisons to a certain Roman Polanski movie cited or alluded to in most reviews are apt. Maybe the resolution of “Hereditary” is the real problem; we’ve been there before.

3. Rotten Tomatoes is the devil. I don’t necessarily believe that myself, but everyone I’ve talked to who hated “Hereditary” mentioned: “And the thing scored 92 on the Tomatometer!” And then internally I hear myself responding: “You’re just a slave to an algorithm.”

4. Everyone’s a critic. We all come to, and come out of, a movie such as “Hereditary” with our own expectations and frames of reference. My expectations and frames of reference were the right ones.

5. Yours were not.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

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