Heirlooms
2026 · 13m
Directed by Peter Huang
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A young woman returning to her family home to care for her ailing grandmother uncovers the haunted legacy passed down through the women of her family.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a competent haunted-house drama that knows exactly what it is—which is precisely the problem. The generational trauma angle is solid, but Huang isn't subverting the form or making us rethink what a family horror story can do; he's executing a template we've seen perfected already.
Huang locates himself in a precise lineage—the domestic gothic, the intergenerational reckoning—and executes with formal control: the editing rhythms mirror the grandmother's failing memory, the color palette bleeds from warmth to cold across the runtime. This is a film that understands its own tradition intimately enough to inhabit it.
The decision to filter every scene through inherited objects—a necklace, a recipe card, a quilt—rather than exposition is what makes the premise breathe; it's how Huang tells us family mythology without a single on-the-nose line, and that economy of storytelling is what transforms a modest budget into something that feels inevitable.