Rating: 4/5
Annie has no control over her life. Even when she sleepwalks, she seems to do the last thing she would want to. So, she makes miniatures of real-life events to give her some sense of autonomy.
Her mother died recently. She didn’t know her mother — she was secretive and only came back into Annie’s life when she got ill.
It’s different when her daughter, Charlie, dies. The grief is overwhelming, and she has difficulty coping. She meets Joan at a Loss of a Loved One meeting, who gives her hope that she can talk to Charlie again.
Now that Ari Aster has put his mommy trauma out for everyone in Beau is Afraid, I was curious to revisit this movie through that lens. I’ll discuss it further in the spoilers section below.
I saw this at IMAX. Before the movie, I got there early enough to see the tail end of Civil War for the third time.
Anyway, the sound design is so tight in this movie that it makes IMAX worth it.
I don’t know if I love this as much as I did when I first saw it, but I still like how this movie feels. I like how it draws out the cruelest aspects of grief. And Toni Collette is iconic — her performance floors me every time I see it.
** SPOILER TALK ** Back to the mommy trauma lens. In that sense, the movie feels much more like a manifestation of Annie’s mental illness. But as I’m writing that out, I’m talking myself out of it.
No theory fully works, which is why this movie is fun. But it’s also why I love it a little less. In good ambiguity, you feel like there is an answer, but it’s irrelevant. Here, it feels like the ending was trying to get to Rosemary’s Baby without doing the legwork.