WARNING: "HEREDITARY SPOILERS" spoilers below
Not sure why the audience needs to empathize with Charley, for the audience to understand her mother's grief. There are certain things a director doesn't need to inform us about. They are taken as a given. Mothers love their children. This is such a universally understood truth it feels weird needing it to be articulated on screen for us. I'd be equally baffled if you need to see your characters eat at some point from fear they might starve to death before the movie ends.
Collette's performance is all we should need to make the emotions of the film real for us. I wouldn't care if Charley was a pet rock. As long as we understand it is her child, the emotions she feels show us all we need to understand the pain. There is no reason to muddy the waters with our own personal feelings towards her child. Because we are watching as members of the audience, we naturally know more than she does, which includes the true nature of her child. To take this knowledge, that Charley is evil, and hold it against the emotional core of the film, just seems a little weird.
Collette's performance is all we should need to make the emotions of the film real for us. I wouldn't care if Charley was a pet rock. As long as we understand it is her child, the emotions she feels show us all we need to understand the pain. There is no reason to muddy the waters with our own personal feelings towards her child. Because we are watching as members of the audience, we naturally know more than she does, which includes the true nature of her child. To take this knowledge, that Charley is evil, and hold it against the emotional core of the film, just seems a little weird.
WARNING: spoilers below
I didn't intentionally choose to not empathize with Annie's grief for Charlie because, since I know I'm watching a creepy kid in a Horror movie, I instinctively know that she's probably possessed by a demon (or whatever the **** was supposed to be going on; it was all pretty vague, to be honest), and I think that Annie shouldn't be sad for her as a result of that, or something. Of course I understand Annie's grief on a basic level, but I ultimately can't empathize with it the way I was meant to, because even putting aside the Horror-based background of the story, Charlie had still been nothing but a black hole of creepy, anti-social behavior and bad, negative vibes the entire time she was onscreen, so I couldn't help but feel a natural sense of relief when she was out of the film, because that's just an inevitable reaction to the sudden absence of such an unlikeable characterization. It's no different from when the first major character to be killed off in Battlestar Galactica was the one that everyone disliked the most anyway, so even though the show tried to play it off like it was some big tragedy, it held little impact when it happened. And I felt that way about Charlie after only "spending" a half hour or so as a movie-watcher, so I can only imagine how big an emotional drag she would end up being on a mother when she has to spend the child's entire lifetime living with and raising her 24/7, you know?
Last edited by StuSmallz; 05-02-21 at 09:21 PM.