Want to know how underwhelming this year’s all-digital Midnight Madness program at the Sundance Film Festival was? Prano Bailey-Bond’s feature-length directorial debut, “Censor,” was the best reviewed feature of the bunch. Yikes. The premise itself looked promising on paper; Enid (Niamh Algar) is a film censor in 1980s Britain, which, if you know your film history, was a tumultuous time for film censorship due to the boom of VHS. Regardless, Enid’s job is to watch an endless amount of gore and sex-filled movies and then makes a decision as to what gets cut, what gets passed, and, for some unlucky filmmakers, what gets banned outright. Enid takes the job so seriously, uttering that she does it to “protect people.” Things change once Enid screens a disturbing horror movie and ostensibly finds links, hidden clues, if you will, to her sister's mysterious disappearance. She soon enters a rabbit hole of film conspiracies, as she frantically looks for clues, searching, in vain, for her sister. Is she an unreliable narrator, you be the judge, but the predictable last few minutes only enhance the frivolous nature of the film. Bailey-Bond isn’t really tackling new cinematic territory here, Peter Strickland did this kind of moody horror in better and more artful ways in 2012’s “Berberian Sound Studio”. It doesn’t help that “Censor” opts for style over substance. Of course, you can cram your film with beautifully conceived and surreal imagery, but if the main protagonist is thinly conceived and emotionally empty then I will quickly lose patience. It only gets worse once the sensorious and visually overdone climax arrives, by then there is no reason to care for Enid or Bailey-Bond’s movie — as her co-worker snidely remarks, “Someone’s lost the plot.”
SCORE: C