"That f*cking face on your face!" - An ode to Toni Collette in Hereditary (2018)

Paimon welcomes you.

Spoilers from the start my dudes. Also, trigger warning for stuff relating to complicated parental relationships.

Hereditary

Written and directed by: Ari Aster

Starring: Toni Collette, Alex Wolff, Milly Shapiro, Ann Dowd, Gabriel Byrne

Run time: 127 minutes

Original release date: June 8, 2018

welcome to philosophy corner, allow me to get real personal for a second

Grief is a madness. It’s almost like a supernatural entity in and of itself, possessing you and warping every emotion over and over again until nothing seems real. No face looks familiar, no sound is a comfort, things do not taste or feel the same. It takes over and sits on your shoulder and in your gut and your chest and it can be there for hours or days or months or years in different forms, always just hiding. There. Present.

Just before Christmas 2021, I lost my dad. He died of early onset Alzheimer’s, just ten years after his diagnosis, in the middle of global pandemic. Dad and I, without going too much into it, had a relationship which was complicated and knotted and frayed, and ugly. So all of that from the previous paragraph, take that and double it with a drink on top. I could not drop everything and go back home to be with my mum. There was no funeral. There was just the knowledge that he was gone. A knowledge that, over the space of the first forty-eight hours, kept stopping me in my tracks to hit me all over again. I have vivid memories of having to go do the last bits of Christmas shopping and freezing up in the middle of the street, muttering “he’s gone” to myself, crying.

Grief is a madness and it is especially a madness when you’re grieving a parent who you had a deeply fraught relationship with. And for my money, nobody has understood this more in a cinematic context than Toni Collette in Ari Aster’s feature debut film Hereditary.

Chekov’s allergy

When we meet Collette’s character, Annie (a miniature artist - the whole set was designed to mirror the aesthetic of one of Annie’s dollhouses), she’s attending the funeral of her mother, Ellen. Annie’s childhood was troubled due to her fraught relationship with Ellen, one that didn’t really right itself until Annie’s daughter Charlie was born (it’s established that Ellen was a significant figure in raising her, to a point where boundaries were crossed). At the funeral, Annie’s surprised to see just how many people turned up, given that her mother was known to be quite secretive.

Annie is a fascinating character; a miniature designer for an art gallery, she’s clearly an accomplished artist, yet haunted by her past. There’s something still childlike about her - we see her talking at a support group about the family dynamics growing up, with her mother having dissociative identity disorder (and later dementia), her father dying from starving himself in a psychotic depression and her brother being schizophrenic. She seems to reach back to a childhood she had to quickly grown up from through her art, using her miniatures to connect to a life not lived, a life mourned.

Annie’s relationships with her own children is a complicated one too; her daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is an insular kid who appears to be drawn to death. Her son Peter (Alex Wolff) meanwhile does not trust her and believes she wants him dead, something which stems from an incident in which a sleepwalking Annie once poured paint thinner on them and tried to set them on fire.

The pivot point of the film comes when Peter is invited to a party and Annie insists (for fuck knows what reason) he takes Charlie with him. Left unsupervised, Charlie eats a slice of chocolate cake which, unknown to her, contains walnuts - this triggers her severe nut allergy, and as Peter drives her to the hospital, Charlie leans out the window for the purpose of getting some air. Peter swerves trying to avoid a dead animal on the ground and to his absolute horror, Charlie is decapitated by a telephone pole marked with a strange sigil.

Completely in shock, Peter drives home and just lays down on his bed, not knowing what to do or where to go. In the morning, we’re listening with him as Annie and dad Steve (Gabriel Byrne) discover her decapitated body in the backseat of the car.

This, in itself, is one of the most devastatingly effective sequences in any horror film. The mounting dread from the second Charlie eats the cake and realizes something’s wrong (we learn early in the film of her allergy which has the potential to be lethal, so it’s like Chekov’s allergy except it happens later in the first act rather than in the third), the panic radiating off Peter, the telephone pole which we first see when they’re driving to the party coming into view, just the moment itself when Charlie sticks her head out, Peter swerves and The Thing Happens and the cherry on top of the dread Sundae, the very real numbness that comes over Peter, tangible as he hasn’t got a fucking clue what to do (would any of us?) so just… drives home and lies down staring into the void.

What makes it even better and even more effective is that it acts as the perfect lead-in for the masterclass in body acting Toni Collette gives from that point out.

the canon of “dinners from hell”

We hear Annie scream and cry and we see her on her hands and knees like she’s been punched in the gut by grief and cannot physically stand up anymore. We see her become resentful of Peter, something which births a prime entry in the filmic canon of dinners from hell: the dinner table rant.

I mentioned Annie seems childlike to begin with but never more than here. Almost none of the words coming out of her mouth sound like an adult having an argument. They sound like an adult trying her best to find the right words to say but being so blinded by her own unspeakable grief and years of trauma in her DNA that she just starts saying shit, leading to possibly my favourite line… ever?

DON'T you swear at me, you little shit! Don't you EVER raise your voice at me! I am your mother! You understand? All I do is worry and slave and defend you, and all I get back is that fucking face on your face!

Let’s be clear here: “that fucking face on your face” has weight. It may not seem like it (because it is, in fact, a deeply ridiculous line) but Toni Collette gives it weight. In Toni-as-Annie's voice, “that fucking face on your face” carries the weight of years of frustration and resentment and the echoes of that childhood trauma Annie carries. It tells you that something deep inside Annie’s subconsciousness knows she’s supposed to be protecting him from something. We find out later that Annie didn’t want to be a mother in the first place and even tried to miscarry Peter but she explains it to Peter as being because she was trying to save him. So the frustration that she’s displaying during that dinner table rant is because she feels he’s neither grateful to her for defending him nor contrite about his sister’s death.

In the second half of the movie, things become horribly clear when the truth of Ellen’s life is revealed and you’re left wondering just how much of the family’s ultimate faith was set in stone from the beginning, even before we meet them at the funeral at the start of the movie. And throughout that second half, as Annie’s double grief warps her brain, Toni Collette continues to deliver on the physicality, culminating in a now-possessed Annie beheading herself WITH A PIANO WIRE.

It is, throughout, a gutsy performance, one that requires Toni to go deep into the mindset of her character - something which she has proven time and time again to be more than capable of doing. Here, she elevates it, taking the viscera of grief and lending it a touch of the demonic. It’s a performance that resonates even more with me looking at it through the lens of having lost my father - hitting the nail on the head of how much grief can eat at you, physically and mentally and spiritually.

(I couldn’t finish this edition without giving you the full clip of the dinner table rant, it’s SO FUCKING GOOD)