Toni Collette has been through hell the past few years. Well, her characters have, at least.
Ever since her role as a grieving mother in Hereditary showcased sinister new depths to her talents, Collette hasn’t been able to catch a break. After being possessed by a demon and decapitating herself with a rusty piano wire in that film, she played a no-nonsense detective investigating a serial rapist in the Netflix series Unbelievable. She gets her arm sliced off in Velvet Buzzsaw, Bradley Cooper murders her husband in Nightmare Alley, and she’s pushed down the titular steps of The Staircase on HBO.
“I suppose you could say some of my recent stuff has been a little heavy,” Collette recently told Vogue. “I like being involved in all kinds of genres in terms of storytelling, but I had been thinking for a long time now about creating something purely joyful.”
Enter Mafia Mamma. The action-comedy follows Kristin, a forty-something writer in the American suburbs dealing with a sexist boss and an unfaithful husband. As Kristin’s life begins to unravel, a business associate of her estranged grandfather’s reaches out, requesting that she attend his funeral in Italy. Hoping to use the trip as an excuse to “Eat, Pray, Fuck” her way through Europe, Kristin’s journey toward self-fulfillment takes an unexpected turn when she discovers that her grandfather was the head of a powerful mafia empire. As his last living descendent, it’s her turn to become the new crime boss.
Mafia Mamma is exactly the kind of high-concept, mid-budget genre movie that everyone complains Hollywood doesn’t make anymore. It’s also an all-too-rare star vehicle for Collette, who always manages to run away with her movies, whether she’s billed first (Muriel’s Wedding) or seventh (Knives Out). Since breaking out in Muriel’s Wedding nearly three decades ago, Collette has carved out a singular resume, defined by her ability to transform; in the case of her role as a housewife with dissociative identity disorder on United States of Tara, that often meant playing anywhere from two to five different characters in the span of a single scene. For Mafia Mamma, Collette wanted to ensure that Kristin was just as fully realized.
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