Here is another horror movie that refuses to show the demons threatening its main characters in every frame. “Relic,” is all about atmosphere, and has a possessed house dissected as a metaphor for, wait for it, dementia.
The film marks the debut for Japanese-Australian director Natalie Erika James, who delivers slow-burn horror that refuses to devolve into cheap scares. Fine with me. The woodsy house outside Melbourne occupied by eighty-something Edna (Robyn Nevin) sets up a moody atmosphere, but is lacking in any kind of efficient storytelling to truly suck us into its ambiguous narrative.
When her calls to mother Edna go unanswered, daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (the always-excellent Bella Heathcote) go to the matriarch’s isolated house only to find granny not there. After a few calls to the police, Edna is officially reported as missing. The shocking disrepair of Edna’s house has Kay worried that something is wrong. It doesn’t help that over the years, an estrangement between mother and daughter has crept up and pulled the two women apart. And then, suddenly, as if nothing happened, Edna returns home three days later with no idea of where she’s been and how she got back home.
As the walls close in, quite literally, on these characters, the ambiguousness of the story starts to become too much of a crux. The abundance of metaphors James uses in her screenplay quickly devolves into obnoxiousness. The house-as-a-metaphor for Edna’s deteriorating mental state is a too on-the-nose creative decision, ditto the black mark on Edna’s chest that, not a coincidence, resembles the black mold invading the premises of her home. It’s all delivered in cryptic fashion by James, who never truly wants to reveal her hand to the audience until the final scene, which, in its own twisted body-horror ways, is no doubt meant to provoke a polarized reaction, but instead results in a questionable thud.
James’ film is meant as a rumination on memory and death. It’s not hard to see the parallels between Edna’s behavior, her memory loss, the disturbing emotional transitions, and not see the signs that come with losing grasp of one’s own self. Edna’s mental state only further deteriorates as the movie goes along, with bouts of verbal and physical abuse towards her daughter and granddaughter starting to frequently creep in.
The slow-build, meant to slowly creep us into the dreaded atmosphere, doesn’t really work. In trying to avoid the pitfalls of cheap scares, James decides to strip off the horror cliches in favor of a more distanced affair. This, in turn, isolated me and prevented my full commitment to the drama which, on its own, isn’t really enough to sustain our full undivided attention.
It does help that the three main actresses really try to draw you into this story; Nevin is frighteningly good in how she portrays her Edna with bouts of silent torture. Meanwhile, Mortimer, an actress of consummate talents, is not afraid of bringing her character to dark places, especially when it comes to the dysfunctional mother-daughter barbs being exchanged here.
And yet, despite the great acting, the excellent production, and sound design, not to mention DP Charlie Sarroff's beautiful grey palettes, “Relic” can’t seem to grasp the fact that to make such a slow-moving movie work, you gotta have a hook. What’s the hook here? There are too many narrative dead-ends in James and Christian White’s screenplay to fully embrace what is, at its core, a fairly familiar story of good vs. evil. [C+]
Criterion's December lineup has some great additions to the library, but the title that jumped out at me is Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man," which officially joins the Collection on December 8.