the crew scares up our favorite horror performances • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

Toni Collette as Annie Graham
Selected by Siddhant Adlakha

With a name that may as well be “anagram,” Toni Collette’s mourning artist Annie Graham scrambles to reassemble the pieces of her life in an order that makes sense when her mother dies, yielding a deeply discomforting performance. Annie crafts miniature dioramas with unwavering focus, shrinking her painful past down to a manageable size, but the sudden, brutal death of her daughter (Milly Shapiro) sends her into a harrowing tailspin.

In an era where Hollywood horror is defined by metaphors for trauma, Hereditary places that trauma front and center, allowing Collette the chance to let loose at the peak of her thespian powers: she not only captures the shattering impact of the worst thing a mother can go through but she also channels larger, deeper, more damaging wounds through her festering grief. “I just want to die!” Annie wails, with skin-crawling desperation—but she can’t, leaving her to deal with an ungrateful son (Alex Wolff), whom Collette lambastes in a now-iconic dinner table scene where she embodies, with stunning precision, the bitter frustrations of a woman coming apart at the seams.