Review: Relic (2020)
Directed by Natalie Erika James; co-written by Natalie Erika James and Christian White; starring Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin and Bella Heathcote.
Known as a rather unsubtle or base genre, horror often gets a bad rap as the loud, crashing, and banging amusement park ride of cinema. A place for low budgets and high box offices, where new filmmakers cut their teeth. But this is rather unfair; great horror is never just about the immediate fear is instills, it’s almost always about something else but will rarely go so far as to explain in explicit terms what that thing is. Instead, it steps back and lets you feel what it’s getting at. Relic is just one such example of this kind of brilliant horror filmmaking.
Upon finally finishing my review of The Father, I wanted to jump into something that I had heard was based on many similar themes to see if I could find something that demonstrates what The Father ultimately did wrong. So, I decided to go for Relic, directed and co-written by Natalie Erika James, a new talent coming out of Australia.
After getting a message indicating that her mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) has gone missing, Kay (Emily Mortimer) travels to her childhood home with her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) to help in the search. Eventually, Edna re-emerges – apparently entirely healthy save for a nasty bruise that seems to resemble the mold currently devouring many areas of the house and the stay at the house takes on a more unsettling tone. Knowing that Edna suffers from a degenerative brain disease, Kay and Sam are soon forced with the decision of how best to take care of the ailing matriarch and as their stay is extended by the request of a doctor, the family entire begins to grapple with what seems to be a kind of preternatural presence infecting the very foundation of the building.
As the title suggests, Relic concerns itself with retracing the family’s steps to attempt to hold onto what memories are still left for the three generations concerned to hold onto. When Sam finds a hidden passageway, a labyrinthine network of hidden passageways lures her deep into the heart of the house and progressively, Sam realises she doesn’t know how to get herself out. The house, the location within which so much of their family’s lifetime has been spent has turned on them. The storage site for so many ancestral secrets and shared histories has become antagonistic and is trapping Sam within, refusing to let her go. So, it falls to Sam to break free, regardless of whether it damages the family memory. Sam, just like Kay, must ultimately consider what is worth holding onto.
At no instance does Relic fall into inane navel-gazing as I’m starting to do here. It knows it’s a horror film and is determined (successfully so) to deliver on that promise. Relic isn’t so ashamed of its own DNA to not infuse a few jumpscares to keep things tense, but its utilising of two key kinds of horror allows the film, in my view, to elevate itself into that category of greatness. The claustrophobia of some scenes such as the one described above is quite clearly approaching the notion of being trapped within the body; disoriented, confused, and unable to ever touch the outside world. The supernatural horror is being used here to point at a deeply human crisis surrounding the confrontation we face from illnesses like Edna’s, as does the more visceral use of bone-crunching and flesh-tearing body-horror approach the terror of the breaking down and frailty of identity.
What I’ve - rather unforgivably - failed to mention thus far, though, are the incredible central performances from the three generations of women at the heart of the film. Mortimer plays Kay’s guilt and shame immaculately and understatedly. Nevin plays the elderly Edna with such disorientation and uneasiness that it’s really quite difficult to feel entirely comfortable when she’s in the room, let alone the shot, whether it’s for the implications her failing memory brings with it or simply the feeling that something’s not quite normal about Grandma anymore. Heathcote next to these performances stays relatively hidden in the background until she’s really given a chance to properly breathe – or struggle to do so with style, as it may be – in her solo scenes and then really embodies the terror we’re all feeling. All three of these actors deserve a whole lot more recognition for this film, I feel and I really hope they get it soon.
Relic is a supremely impressive outing from all involved and I’d highly recommend it to any horror fans.
Watched on 2nd May