One cursory Twitter scroll on Mother’s Day and you’re going to come face to face with at least 27 different tweets with the same photo of Toni Collette in the now-infamous dinner table scene in Hereditary, face contorted in a visceral mixture of grief and anger. Even The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tweeted "Happy Mothers Day to Toni Collette in Hereditary" despite the movie never receiving any Oscar nominations.
It’s simply undeniable that Collette was incredible in Ari Aster’s feature film debut, and it helped to reposition her in the eyes of a new generation that may not have been as familiar with her talents, or of her oeuvre that has spanned decades in the industry. That film instantly made her a horror legend. But every chilling scene in Hereditary is nothing compared to Collette’s performance in the second episode of The Staircase, particularly one scene that is so unforgettably realistic, so imbued with true terror, that I’m not sure I ever want to take the stairs again for the rest of my life. Elevators or bust.
The Staircase—which airs Thursdays on HBO Max and has the first three of eight episodes available to stream now—is based on the formative true-crime docuseries of the same name by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade, which followed the murder trial of famed war novelist Michael Peterson after his wife Kathleen was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their North Carolina home.
The first eight episodes of Lestrade’s docuseries aired in 2004, well before the age of binge-watching made the true crime genre all but synonymous with streaming. But even by today’s standards, the original series remains as grisly and gut-wrenching as ever. Maybe that’s because it wasn’t competing to set itself apart from an overly-saturated market of docuseries with eye-roll-inducing twists and lame reveals, like your average streamer-dumped true-crime fare today. Or maybe it’s because its director isn’t American! Whatever it is, The Staircase has managed to maintain a stark, almost refreshing frankness that still inspires the genre.
Enter HBO Max’s dramatization of the case, helmed by writer and director Antonio Campos. Flashy and star-studded without ever feeling flippant, Campos’ The Staircase exhumes the not-so-cold-case and all of its murky details to give us the one perspective that had not yet been covered in the original series or any of its follow-up episodes: Kathleen’s.
Toni Collette plays Kathleen in the months leading up to her tragic fate with a motherly tenderness that was not always afforded to the memory of the real person in Lestrade’s series, which, like so many true-crime series that followed it, tended to reduce a vibrant woman to a victim’s body and evidence in a trial.
Sure, Kathleen’s children, stepchildren, immediate family, and even the husband who was eventually convicted of her murder all speak of Kathleen with great affection, but viewers were never able to get a sense of who she was prior to her untimely death without it being so tied up in the circumstances of the death itself.
Much like he did with his work directing early episodes of The Sinner, Campos allows the camera to linger on the woman at the heart of this mystery. Collette’s Kathleen is troubled and wearied; she works too much, drinks too much, and doesn’t get to spend enough time with her kids. Then there’s her husband's demanding schedule, which requires her to be not only present but effervescent during his campaign for City Council.
In a heartbreaking moment in the series’ second episode, Kathleen leans into Michael’s shoulder and drops her smile. “I’m tired, Michael,” she says, meekly. “Like, all the time. To my bones.” Her quiet cry for help goes almost entirely unnoticed by her husband and is then brilliantly interspersed with a flash-forward in time to Michael’s trial preparation following her death, where a recording of a woman crying for help from the stairs is used to gauge what Michael could’ve heard if he was outside during Kathleen’s purported accident.
Kathleen’s vulnerable moment with her husband is a stunning aside, played with a subtle but undeniably effective despondency by Collette. It’s that moment that she rounds Kathleen into a fully-realized depiction of an actual woman, with all of her nuance and imperfection, instead of just the ghost that lingered through the original docuseries—which is what makes the very next scene so excruciatingly unforgettable.
Campos’ The Staircase is intent on exploring every theory surrounding Kathleen’s death, including the most contested one: that she accidentally tripped and fell on the stairs, suffering lacerations to the skull from the fall but no fractures that would be consistent with a beating. On the night of her death, Kathleen walks into the house from beside the pool, leaving Michael outside, to head upstairs and get ready for bed.
Toni Collette and Colin Firth in Episode 2 of “The Staircase.”
HBO MaxIt’s at this point that you want to yell at the screen like you know the killer lurks just beyond the shadows and if the character you’re rooting for would just go the other way, they could save themselves from certain demise. But we know what’s coming, it’s unavoidable. And as Collette’s Kathleen rounds the corner to the staircase, we have no choice but to white-knuckle the couch and hold our breath.
Four steps up, Kathleen slips backward and falls, unable to hold her grip on the railing. Her feet slide up and she tumbles backward, hitting her head on the sharp corner of the door frame, knocking her momentarily unconscious and slumping at the foot of the stairs. She lays motionless for 22 endless seconds, blood pooling from around her head wound before she gasps and tries to prop herself up.
Feeling the blood trickle down her head and becoming dizzy, she falls back again and onto her stomach. She begins to cough, blood pooling in her throat and splattering onto the wall. She struggles to steady herself, trying to grab the door frame at the foot of the stairs while calling for help before her feet slip in her own blood, sending her back against the wall and into another coughing fit. She tries once more to grab hold onto something, anything, while calling out quietly one last time before slumping over, choking as she bleeds out.
There are just two whole minutes between when Kathleen trips and when she’s depicted taking her last breaths, but it feels like at least two hours. I couldn’t breathe from the moment it happened until the frame cut away from Toni Collette. It was unquestionably one of the most brutal things I’ve ever seen depicted in television or film.
The horror genre has no shortage of gore, but this was something far more affecting: a serving of uncontrollable possibility that could happen to anyone at a moment’s notice. I had to pause and take stock of how many times I’ve run up or down the treacherous stairs of a New York City subway station to catch a train, or how many times I’ve taken too small of a step and tripped while hurrying up the stairs in my building to see if I left my coffee maker on. My God, the number of times I’ve sloshed down wet, uneven stairs on a rainy day just for the chance to catch the B Train—and for what?!
This scene was enough to make me Google how much it would cost me to get a Life Alert, which opened a second can of worms when I found out how difficult it is to get a straight answer off their website. Here’s your real spoiler alert: They don’t tell you! You have to call the number listed on their site, where operators are surely standing by to convince older members of society that it’s worth whatever exorbitant bill they’re finally quoted. Except now I’m convinced that it would be. I simply don’t feel safe ever taking the stairs again. Ground floor only for me from now on, either that or I’ll just scoot.
Season 1 of Russian Doll made me feel similarly after seeing Natasha Lyonne break her neck after falling down the stairs one thousand times, but that was a comedy. She comes back to life! Toni Collette commits to this gruesome scene with such fervor that it was like watching someone I truly love suffering to their very last breath. If Campos’ intention was to convey exactly what Michael Peterson could have felt were his unwavering claims of innocence indeed found to be irrefutably true, he certainly did it more effectively than Peterson’s own testimony ever could.
In just two measly minutes, Toni Collette’s staggering work in The Staircase managed to blow her petrifying performances in Hereditary and The Sixth Sense out of the water. Her characters in those films became standouts in her career because Collette has always been disturbingly good at portraying how the challenges of motherhood and the instinct to protect your children war with the interference of the supernatural. But in The Staircase, she manages to say even more with less screen time.
Gone is the need for any harrowing dinner table scenes or grief-stricken screaming matches. There are no kings of Hell being called upon here, no sons who can see dead people. Instead, there is just a mother who is struggling to keep her head above water, wanting more for herself and unable to find the words to express it, who meets her untimely end at the bottom of a staircase. However it really happened, we may never know. But that’s not the point of this retreading.
The purpose of The Staircase is to find humanity in a whodunit, to make us care more deeply about the real people at the center of true crime prestige television, something that has become too easy to overlook in favor of finishing a binge-watch. And, maybe, to also hold onto the railing a little tighter next time we take the stairs.
