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Why is ‘Hereditary’ such a hit with critics — and an apparent flop with audiences?

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

The average American moviegoers 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, slow-building 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, methodical creep-out averaged out to a grim D+ score.

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

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 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, delivering massive, cathartic scares.

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

Distributed by A24, “The Witch” and “Hereditary” share some personality traits that may shed some light on those discouraging exit-poll grades. They’re both ardent 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, yet the film is a fairly punishing experience designed, its maker says, to mess with audience expectations and “betray you on every level.”

I knew “Hereditary’s” mass appeal was more like niche appeal, at best, when I heard from my old pal John, a longtime security guard who worked down at the loading dock entrance of the Chicago Tribune, back when the paper was still in Tribune Tower.

“So boooooring,” he wrote. “There was a collective groan from the audience at the ArcLight. Great idea poorly executed. At least a half hour too long. Almost as boring as ‘The Witch’!”

John and I bonded years ago over our mutual love of Bong Joon-ho’s terrific sea monster movie “The Host,” so if he didn’t go for “Hereditary,” he didn’t go for “Hereditary.” But that “Witch” line hurt. What’s the deal? Was John the only person CinemaScore polled on the way out of both movies?

Of course not. CinemaScore works from a somewhat larger statistical sample. But today, as I hear from various readers and colleagues who did not like much of anything about “Hereditary,” I’ll offer these thoughts:

The movie’s extraordinarily hard on its characters. The suffering in “Hereditary” is multidirectional and relentless. The “kills” aren’t fun, or entertaining gross-outs. The pacing’s the opposite of kinetic or manic.

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, more than once.

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

Everyone’s a critic. Which is true: 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.

Yours were not.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune