Relic, Natalie Erika James’s directorial debut, has what most every respectable horror movie seems to have nowadays: atmosphere. It’s got the sickly color correction, the trembling score, the spooky corridors, the avant-garde-lite waking dreams, the unanswered questions. It’s got curious camera angles that pointedly obstruct our view of the action, making the world of the movie seem appropriately off-kilter, just this side of normal.
What the movie lacks is a little harder to put a finger on, partially due to what James is admirably attempting to give us: a genuine slow burn. It’s a horror movie that delays the big scares, foregoes a clean pursuit of answers, and instead piles on details that may or may not “mean” anything. They appear onscreen with a saggy and somewhat overburdened sense of psychological import, pointing toward the broader implications of what’s at play here: a matriarch’s possible dementia, for example. What they really evoke is the richer, more involved and chilling story this movie seems to want to be.
Emily Mortimer stars as Kay, who, with her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote), has travelled from Melbourne to check in on her mother, who’s gone missing. Edna (Robyn Nevin), widowed and living alone, hasn’t been seen by her neighbor in a few days. The neighbor had already been keeping his distance after an incident in which Edna locked his son in a closet and forgot about him. There are scratches on the inside of the closet door from where the boy apparently tried to paw himself out—scratches suggesting a more than casual fear. Because a horror movie house is never merely a home—nor are its closets ever just closets, its hallways ever just throughways. All must portend the unknown.
Edna does return, for what it’s worth. The question of where she is becomes a question of where she’s been, and what’s up with the marks on her body, the blood on her nightgown. Still, somehow, what’s known in Relic is almost more intriguing than the foggy mysteries hovering about the edges.
Sure, a brief reference to a shack behind Edna’s house—the shack we keep seeing in Kay’s dreams, perhaps?—is conceptually spooky, and the structure itself is a mildewed nightmare scarier than any ghost I can think of. Yet somehow it’s not as intriguing as the post-it notes Edna has left all around her home—reminders such as “Flush” and “Turn off tap”—paired with the woman’s unusual strength and her swift mood changes, her wandering, her forgetting of peoples’ names. Like many recent horror films of its ilk, Relic feels like a family drama attached to a spookshow. And like many of them, it doesn’t entirely figure out a way to reconcile the gap; what suffers the most is the psychological story meant to be the backbone of all the horror.
A good number of Relic’s scenes feel painfully whittled down to plot particulars, rather than presenting chances to see the characters grapple, in a sincere way, with the mess they’re in. A strange thing will happen, a chasm of personal history will open up… and the scene will end. Cut to the next next cluster of details that the audience is meant to keep in mind until whatever it is that’s traumatizing these people—beyond the aging and possible dementia of a beloved matriarch, I mean—finally shows its face.
I’ve been feeling lately that mainstream horror has lost its sense of how to wed dramatic, relatable issues—grief and trauma, among others—to genre. The pieces have rarely come together for me, of late; the drama, the real stuff, feels grafted onto a horror film that could use extra heft. It often feels like a mismatch for the particular story these directors are trying to tell. And so you get horror films that are said to be “about X,” rather than just another horror movie—while ultimately failing to make good on any of these myriad parts.
Relic is yet another of these films. It has the benefit of good acting—and I wasn’t kidding about the mildew, which sincerely made my skin crawl. I could have used more of that feeling. And less of the drama manufactured to justify it.
Where to Watch Relic:
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