“There’s a scene early in Hereditary where Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother, attends a support group and, after some gentle prodding, reluctantly opens up her fraught relationship with her own recently deceased mother. It was during this scene that I realized, before anything overtly horrific had happened, I was fully absorbed, largely thanks to the choices Collette makes. The obvious and easy thing would’ve been to push Annie’s brittleness, to intimate darkness and fragility as Annie shares her various traumas. Collette is smarter than that, playing the moment as pragmatic and, though she’s reluctant to open up, clear-eyed about her own baggage. There are many horror stories about broken people who are preyed upon by monsters; what sets Collette’s Annie apart is that she’s a flawed but self-aware person who tries, even before all hell breaks loose, to take care of herself. And she’s no less doomed because of it.
“Collette’s approach to the character is also key to making Hereditary’s tricky narrative work. The movie’s last third reveals a greater context for the movie’s horrors that we, and the movie’s characters, have only glimpsed in fragments. Among the details that are brought into focus in retrospect are some of the details Annie shares in the support group and, later, when she has tea with Joan (Ann Dowd), a woman she met at the group. In the latter scene, Annie offhandedly mentions a sleepwalking incident that elicits a “Wait...what?” response from us; while we only fully understand its implications at the movie’s end, Collette pulls off a tricky balancing act, embedding the story’s sinister purposes in a matter-of-fact self-justification that is, in retrospect, deadpan hilarious. Of course she’d never do anything to hurt her children, and how ridiculous it is that her family would doubt her!
“It’s Collette’s performance that holds a Bergmanesque psychological horror punctuated by splatter movie shocks together, largely because she’s restrained when it would’ve been easy to go big. And she does go big, too, but the power of moments like her dinner table explosion of grief and rage, or everything she does in the movie’s last fifteen minutes, is in the juxtaposition with the Annie we see in those quieter moments, who is sincerely trying to be strong for herself and her family. The horror of Hereditary lies in the notion that we’re imprisoned by the choices our parents made for us before we even got here. For all the effective shocks in the film, it’s the psychic violence of its premise that lingers after, and while writer/director Ari Aster deserves the credit for making a truly disturbing movie, it’s Collette’s performance that gives it a tragic dimension.” ~ Andrew Bemis
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