Give Toni Collette an Oscar Please

Rating: 8/10 (10 October 2018)

Toni Collette, one of the best actresses currently in the business, is giving one of the best performances of the year in this high-strung horror movie.
She plays the deeply troubled matriarch of a disintegrating family, struggling against a legacy of possibly inherited mental illness as well as her own unresolved feelings about the death of her mother and her maternal inadequacies. Things are already looking fairly bleak for this family when an unimaginable tragedy occurs, hastening the downward spiral of Collette's character. But she finds solace when she's befriended by a woman who's into spiritualism and who teaches Collette how to commune with the dead. That's when the proverbial poop really hits the fan.
"Hereditary" belongs to that sub-genre of horror movies currently in vogue and that includes films like "The Babadook," "The Witch," and "It Follows," where the scares can all be accepted at face value or viewed as stand ins for bigger emotions and themes. In "Hereditary," the horror that unfolds is as much about grief and the ever-present fear mothers have that they're failing their families in some way as it is about any of the literal things happening on screen. Indeed, as the movie gets closer to its conclusion, and the filmmakers feel more obligated to explain all the mystery, the film gets less scary. No, for me the two scariest moments in the film are monologues delivered by Toni Collette, one to a grief support group in which she elaborates on the history of her family, and the other a confession she makes to a friend about her feelings about her children. Both are bone chilling, and far scarier than the more traditionally scary things that occur later in the film. The unexplored terrain of the human mind will always be more frightening to me than any supernatural oogie boogies.
And shout out to Ann Dowd as the spiritualist friend, who's friendly as can be in all of her scenes but nevertheless leaves the impression of having been terrifying. She's hot on your heels, Ruth Gordon.
Grade: A-