Like the most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival went from a face-to-face showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we will still bring analysis and insights into the most interesting experiences we encounter, from independent films to VR experiments.
Censorship is the curse of artists, but it is also a reluctant compliment – because being a dedicated censor requires believing that art has power. This belief is the dark heart of Censor, a horror film about the most infamous moral panic in the world of horror films.
Censorship, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival this week, is the debut of Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond. It is set in 1980s Britain, during the height of the “nasty videos” controversy, which saw dozens of films – some by now iconic names like Dario Argento and David Cronenberg, others by directors who were quickly forgotten – banned or censored for their violence violence and sex.
Enid (Niamh Algar) is a screenwriter for Britain’s film rating board, a small team that stands between upright citizens and an idiot that corrupts the mind. She treats her work with tired resignation, apparently unmoved by constant simulations of clotted blood and the occasional malicious producer. Then, a film she approved supposedly inspires a murder, sparking a firestorm in the press. An enigmatic horror film brings back the memories of his long-lost sister, whose disappearance has haunted Enid and his parents for years. Your life starts to fall apart.
Censor recognizes the almost inherent grace of film content ratings – the process of dwelling on trash exploitation and recommending arbitrary cuts for dismemberment and evisceration scenes, trying to find out exactly how much face eating is aesthetically defensible in a work of art. Although the real list of “nasty videos” contained gems like Argento’s Suspiria and Cronenberg Scanners, Censor is more concerned with its deluge of flashy, budgetless projects that were negotiated out of sheer shock. Its centerpiece is a fictional work, almost without plot, entitled Do not enter the church, a nod to the horror filmmakers’ favorite command to the audience.
But Censor it is much more frightening than exaggerated. Although its ending does not meet its incredibly effective configuration, Algar captures Enid’s increasingly distressed exhaustion as she tries to solve a mystery that no one else believes. Paparazzi and anonymous phone calls end your sanity. Common spaces become subtly threatening, like Enid’s bleak apartment and dark, almost palpably old-fashioned office.
With the end of the video panic, it is easier to have sympathy for the censor, a figure who for a long time was ridiculed as a heartless prude or comic scolding. The film explores a more frightening idea: cinematographic sin-eaters like Enid see a blurred border between reality and fiction and, in the wrong circumstances, can completely lose control of those lines. How much more Censor the harder it gets to distinguish between your real story and your fictional films within the film.
That these movies look kind of bad just do Censor more effective. A lot of terror explores the premise that films drive people crazy, like that of John Carpenter Cigarette Burns or the 2018 mock documentary Antrum. Here, there is nothing special about the nasty videos – but the audience still infuses them with power.
The enemy of the film directorate, ultimately, is not the director behind a decadent killer. It is the boy who steps back and repeats a fleeting moment of blood, or the criminal inspired by mere assumptions about what is in a movie, or the tabloid who turns those assumptions into a scandal. Because in Censor, art only gives people permission to leave reality behind. He cannot control where they end up.