In this slow burn psychological horror film from Australia, writer-director Natalie Erika James delivers a striking debut that’s soaked with dread and existential fear. The story concerns a generational trio of women. There’s Edna, the grandmother, played by Robyn Nevin; Kay, the mother, played by Emily Mortimer; and Bella, the grand daughter, played by Bella Heathcote. When Edna goes missing, Kay and Bella arrive at their old family home, fearing the worst, especially given Edna’s deteriorating mental state. But Edna returns quite suddenly in the middle of the night, unwilling to communicate about the days she was missing, acting strangely. As the film progresses, Kay begins to wonder if she’s seeing the last of Edna’s mind slip away into dementia or if something more evil has taken root in her mother.
This is a very, very slow-burn film, very moody, very dark and very quiet. It’s also very creepy and the fact that it takes place almost entirely in this creaky old house with mainly these three cast-members makes the film feel claustrophobic and tense. The atmosphere is one of creeping dread, whispered conversations taking the place of jump scares. The performances are fantastic, most especially Emily Mortimer. One of the most unsettling scenes in the film is really just a wordless, very quiet long scene at dinner. Mortimer’s Kay slowly becomes aware that Edna is staring at her and when she looks at Enda, she sees in her eyes a look of absolute malice, pure hate. Nevin is chilling in this moment, and in a lot of others, where she behaves in a very unsettling way; and watching Mortimer’s face as she becomes increasingly unsettled by her mother’s gaze is genuinely frightening. This is a film about dementia, of course, and I think in this scene James is getting at a basic, almost primal, fear, the fear of looking into the eyes of someone you love and seeing someone or something else looking back. Once you become an adult, it’s a fear that you feel for your aging parents. But James has room for empathy for Edna as well; the film ultimately doesn’t have an explicit answer to whether Edna is possessed by some kind of spirit or simply suffering the final slip out of her personality and into dementia, but Edna does have moments of lucidity, moments when she is free of whatever malign influences are plaguing her and there’s a heartbreaking scene of Edna going through old photographs, trying to absorb the memories from them almost viscerally, memories that she has either lost or is losing and it is absolutely heart-rending. I’ve never dealt with this issue in my family; my father died very young and my mother is still mentally sharp for the most part. I would say that if you have had issues relating to dementia in your family, that this movie will probably be very triggering for you and I would actually caution you against watching it and I suppose, since this is a horror movie, that’s pretty high praise for it. It’s certainly upsetting and very difficult to watch at times.
In my opinion, James struggles to stick the landing exactly the way she wants to. This movie clocks in at just under ninety minutes, but there’s a stretch in the third act where the family home seems to be shifting and growing with new rooms and our characters find themselves lost in the labyrinth of it. I think I see what this is probably intended to evoke, the sense of being utterly and hopelessly lost in a place where you should feel familiar and comfortable. But in the execution, it’s essentially just twenty minutes of people wandering down identical dark hallways and occasionally screaming. I got pretty bored with that bit and it is the section of the film where things become the most straight-forward in terms of the horror/violence element. And after all that noise and chaos, things do settle down for a dread-soaked final scene that somehow manages to be both hopeful and frightening and I really liked the final shot of the movie. So, I have to give this movie a bit of a ding for that overlong sequence in the third act which, given the movie’s short running time, does feel like a place where they just kind of padded the film so that it would reach the eighty-nine minute mark. Still, the bulk of this movie is exactly the kind of understated horror that I love, quiet, character-based, exquisitely performed, an examination of dread rather than blinding terror and, ultimately, a movie that’s about something, actually has themes and something to say. When this movie works, which is a full eighty percent of the time I’d say, it’s near perfect; that other twenty percent is not that good, but the film is still very much worth a watch overall and it is definitely an unsettling and disturbing experience. And I look forward to seeing what Natalie James does next; this is a very assured debut, confident in its quietness and long silences, avoiding melodrama and over-the-top horror tricks. Her next film, Apartment 7A, is currently in post-production; it stars Julia Garner and the only story note on IMDB is that the plot is being kept secret. Even though I think there were missteps in Relic, I’ll definitely be checking Apartment 7A out when it arrives. 3 ½ stars.
tl;dr – Australian horror is slow-burn & ambiguous with dread-soaked atmosphere; nuanced performances elevate this exploration of dementia with only some slight missteps in act 3. 3 ½ stars.