Niamh Algar stars as a film censor in 1980s Britain, who dedicates herself a little too much to work on director Prano Bailey-Bond’s debut feature film.
Plunged in the bloody appearance, dirty feeling and transgressive spirit of the so-called “nasty videos” of the 1980s, British horror film metaphor Censor offers an admirable pastiche, enriched with black humor. Long debut by director Prano Bailey-Bond, whose short film traveled Unpleasant covered similar territory, Censor stars the next actor Niamh Algar (Calm with Horses) as a film censor who perceives frightening parallels between a horror film that she evaluates for work and a tragedy from her own past.
The many internal jokes and allusions to vintage shocks should amuse fans with long memories and substantial collections of home entertainment. That said, it is sometimes not easy to say whether the sometimes affected performances of the peripheral cast and narrative movements bordering on the cliché are part of the homage or just a weak regular technique. There may be a little bit of column A and column B at work here.
But either way, the film’s selection on Sundance’s popular Midnight strand, even as part of a socially distanced festival, should give the film some edge in the nicely but densely populated self-conscious arthouse horror category, British subsection (see also Peter Strickland’s Fabric, several Ben Wheatley films and so on).
Algar’s protagonist, Enid Baines, is a quiet worker who represses her natural beauty with a librarian style of glasses with steel frames. She works as an examiner at a quasi-governmental organization that, although she doesn’t have her name here, presumably should be the British Board of Film Censors or the post-1984 renamed version of the same organization, the British Board of Film Certification.
An montage of audio and archival TV clips on the opening credits places the action around the mid-decade cusp for the Council, in the wake of the outrage of conservatives (and conservatives, as in the Conservative party) and right-wing moralists, even weapons about terror or heavy films like Driller Killer (glimpsed here), I spit on your grave and Cannibal Holocaust. Self-proclaimed moral guardians like Mary Whitehouse accused these “video villains” of modeling violent and imitative behavior that could corrupt young people, a risk heightened by the new availability of the VHS format that brought movies home, where children could access it without supervision. As a result, some of the more radical films were unable to circulate on video and had to be reviewed by examiners, who suggested extensive cuts to soften the material. Consequently, Enid spends most of his working hours watching VHS movies with colleagues, a remote control in hand to freeze images for closer examination and writing notes like “plucking your eyes should be done!”
But when she is assigned to evaluate a film called Don’t go to church, directed by Frederick North (Adrian Schiller), a specialist in fringe slasher images, and distributed by the despicable producer / distributor Doug Smart (Michael Smiley), Enid is deeply shaken by what she sees. The opening scene – in which two girls play near a cabin in the forest and enter it, with one of them ending up dead – brings details that touch on Enid’s own traumatic experience 20 years ago, when her little sister Nina disappeared into the woods. Enid was with her at the time, but she can’t remember exactly what happened, and Nina was never found. Her parents (played by Clare Holman and Andrew Havil) recently decided that Nina should be declared legally dead to “move on”.
Enid cannot deal with that decision, and the film suggests that this legal move accelerates a psychological breakdown for censorship, perhaps compounded by the relentless exposure to cinematic violence in his work. Like Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991), who introduced Arsinée Khanjian as a censor obsessed with pornography, Censor it postulates that the repeated viewing of proscribed material, even by someone supposedly dispassionate and hired to judge such work professionally, can create an unhealthy appetite for the same things they should regulate.
It’s almost a variant of the old twist in the killer-is-really-the-cop story, and Censor it’s not subtle about planting early clues that Enid may be going crazy – even before he develops an obsessive belief that a red-haired actor in the North and Smart films is actually his long-lost sister, now grown up and apparently eager to relive the trauma drama.
Once the final credits roll, the Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher script seems a bit unsubstantiated and misses the chance to really devour the fleshy subject of the 1980s censorship cultural wars, a topic that seems strangely resonant now. However, the mimicry of the 16 mm vintage stock and the gloomy and jelly-like illumination of the horror resources of the time is delightfully performed by DP Annika Summerson, working closely with production designer Paulina Rzeszowska and costume designer Saffron Cullane. Among them, they have the palette of faded beige fabric, fluorescent sheen and fake scarlet blood on the spot.
Meanwhile, Tim Harrison’s sound design, filled with mysterious creaks and barely audible screams, bleeds perfectly along with Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s original score of John Carpenter synthesized sounds and chords sustained. Bailey-Bond and the producers put together a great team to deliver a convincing-looking ersatz time capsule. It is a pity that there is nothing more surprising or original inside.
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (midnight)
Cast: Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian Schiller, Michael Smiley, Clare Holman, Andrew Havill, Felicity Montagu, Danny Lee Wynter, Clare Perkins, Guillaume Delaunay, Richard Glover, Beau Gadsdon, Amelie Child-Villiers
Production: A presentation by BFI, Film4 & Ffilm Cymru Wales of a production by Silver Salt Films in association with Kodak Motion Picture & Cinelab London
Director: Prano Bailey-Bond
Screenwriters: Prano Bailey-Bond, Anthony Fletcher
Producer: Helen Jones
Executive producers: Andy Starke, Ant Timpson, Kim Newman, Naomi Wright, Lauren Dark, Ollie Madden, Daniel Battsek, Mary Burke, Kimberley Warner
Director of photography: Annika Summerson
Production designer: Paulina Rzeszowska
Costume Designer: Saffron Cullane
Publisher: Mark Towns
Music: Emilie Levienaise-FarrouchSound designer: Tim Harrison
Cast: Nanw Rowlans
Sales: photos of protagonists
84 minutes