Shock horror: here is one of the best films of 2020
Relic 15 cert, 90 min
★★★★★
Dir Natalie Erika James Starring Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin, Bella Heathcote
Covid Hallowe’en carries with it a certain existential chill. It may not be tempting to leave the fireside, especially not to catch a sad, ghoulish Australian horror that confronts some of the very terrors the pandemic has inflamed. Inconveniently, it’s also one of the year’s best films.
Though it’s about fears of growing old, being old, and being near the elderly, Relic heroically transcends the path of cheap exploitation. (For that, M Night Shyamalan’s grannybashing 2015 shocker The Visit remains at your disposal.) Instead, this is a strange, serious, adult piece, and the rare scary film that marries dread-filled imagination with moving insight.
Natalie Erika James, the film’s first-time director, partly based her story on a grandma who had Alzheimer’s, and the frightening sense of estrangement from a family member lost in dementia. As it begins, the widowed Edna (Robyn Nevin) has gone missing from her country home outside Melbourne, and her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) venture there to poke around and find her.
The house is eerie, and rotting from within. It’s also a hoarder’s paradise, piled with a life’s worth of faded memories. Edna carves candles, which glisten luridly from the shelves, and she’s filled every spare room with boxes of junk. When she abruptly returns, covered in filth, they wonder quite how much of her has come back. Behind the walls at night, there’s also the clanking, malign sound of something trapped – an uninvited guest.
The slow-drip terrors here take a back seat to the family crisis. Daunted by the burden of care, Kay wants to install her mother in a home – a place with promised “five-star living”, which
she goes to check out. The tiny sliver of a sea view makes you wonder what three-star living might entail. One look at this cramped horizon and Kay is back behind her steering wheel, sobbing uncontrollably.
Meanwhile, Sam rallies to Edna’s side, even suggesting she could move in to help. But her grandma veers from being witheringly sharp to losing all sense of herself, in shocking lapses that make her a danger to everyone. There’s a dreadful black bruise growing in the hollow of her chest. And there’s the lurking whatever-it-is behind the fireplace, and under her bed. “Turn off taps” is one thing to find jotted down in your relative’s scrawl. “Don’t follow it” is a good deal creepier.
Something is passing down here between the generations. Kay remembers a great-grandfather who was neglected in the garden shed, virtually left to die. The horror of abandonment seeps in. During a scene in a forest glade, where loving emotions pour out between Edna and Kay, the whole film deepens startlingly, not least because the tense, sorrowful Mortimer and inspired Nevin seem to bare their souls. It’s terrifically acted by all three.
At this moment, Sam’s alone, and has never been more so. By design, we never get the hang of the house’s layout – Edna makes the familiar remark that it has seemed bigger ever since her husband died. But the more of it we discover, the more cornered we feel. As Sam lugs boxes aside to find whole passageways she didn’t know existed, the place takes on an MCEscher-like geography. It’s untrustworthy. Crawlspaces suddenly have no exit. Corridors abort.
Without insisting on this meaning, it resembles a map of the mind – of Edna’s mind, with the walls closing in. This section of the film is deviously clever, backing us into dead ends and fusing the lights as if the whole building was a brain in shutdown.
Thankfully, Relic’s never satisfied with making Edna evilly monstrous, for all the decrepitude she undergoes, and the unpredictable violence she inflicts. The more grotesque its imagery, the more tender its twists. James and her cast play their whole tale poignantly for keeps, and we get quite the cathartic workout vis-à-vis senescence and last rites. We’re grossed out, running scared. But then we draw close with this trio, huddled against the night.
In cinemas and online on Video on Demand from today