Opinion

REVIEW: Relic

Kay (Emily Mortimer) has to deal with an elderly mother who’s losing her mind — or something worse — in Australian director Natalie Erika James’ horror film “Relic,” which was one of the stand-outs at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
Kay (Emily Mortimer) has to deal with an elderly mother who’s losing her mind — or something worse — in Australian director Natalie Erika James’ horror film “Relic,” which was one of the stand-outs at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

Years ago, I was house-hunting in a neighborhood in South Philadelphia. It had already been an arduous search, such that my Realtor had started exploring possibilities that he almost had to know were unlikely at best. In this period of desperation, he took me to a house on a quiet alley street, in between two busier thoroughfares. From the outside, it was unremarkable, but from the minute I stepped in, with the owner standing there in his pajamas, watching a grainy TV flickering "Antiques Roadshow," I got the serious creeps. Normally, I would have told my Realtor to move on immediately, but since the owner was there, and seemed eager for us to see the place, I felt obliged to make a sort of pity walk-through.

Only, the more I saw, the more this man's life felt almost unendurable to withstand: By the time we got to his bedroom, with the sheets greasy and dirty from use, and his body's imprint left on the mattress, I couldn't even pretend otherwise: I rushed back down the stairs, thanked the man, who was sitting in his chair in front of that TV as I headed out the door, and told my Realtor whatever that house was, I wanted absolutely no part of it.

The idea of someone else's life is the basis of most of our narratives, but rarely are those stories about the inexplicable, self-sustaining purgatories of the elderly, trapped in failing bodies, with the creep of dementia and psychosis blurring together in their minds, like the bleed of a spill of ink on blotter paper. If we are ourselves not at that stage, it is an unknown to us, even as we see it in the eyes of our elderly family members; and if it is an unknown, it can be made to be terrifying.

That's the premise, at least, of Aussie director Natalie Erika James' film "Relic," based on her own 2017 short. Kay (Emily Mortimer) arrives at the home of her elderly mum, Edna (Robyn Nevin), with her grown daughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote), in tow, shortly after her mother seemingly disappears. After investigating the house, a large old, half-decrepit manse in the middle of the Australian woods somewhere outside Melbourne, Kay gets the cops involved, and a manhunt begins only to end a few days later when Edna suddenly appears back in the kitchen one morning, barefoot and making tea.

It becomes clear that Edna is losing her mind, forgetting things she's just said, and flying into a paranoid rage when questioned about them. She's also prone to standing by herself in the downstairs living room, mumbling as if in conversation with someone not present. As these things often do, the creepy noises and unnerving knocks in the house start to build in intensity, until Kay and Sam are seemingly running for their lives through the endless, shifting corridors and hallways of the house, being pursued by something sinister, very much resembling Edna.

What makes James' film work as well as it does is its sense of subtlety. In the opening salvo, as we watch the bathtub in Edna's house overflow with water, pooling and spilling down the stairs, to where Edna is, again, standing in the living room, in front of a glowing off-and-on Christmas tree, the framing is such that a lone shadowy figure on the farthest edge of the frame rising up in front of her is only barely perceptible (and even then, only after careful viewing and reviewing, one of the genuine perks of our current streaming era). Time and again, the film posits a character looking meaningfully at something we can't quite discern when their POV (point-of-view) shot is revealed.

The attention paid to cinematographic effectiveness occurs throughout the production: In one fascinating shot, as Kay wakes up in the night and goes downstairs to where her mother is again standing and mumbling, her long, gray hair splayed in front of her face such that it appears she's facing the opposite way, their duality is revealed brilliantly. As she approaches her mother, we are given a horizontal two-shot, with Kay moving into frame facing toward Edna, but our view of Edna comes from an adjacent mirror. The effect is having them face each other, seemingly on the same plane, but with the focus shifting back and forth between the two of them to reflect the way in which despite the composition, they are clearly nowhere near each other.

The screenplay, written by James and Christian White, is clean. Spare but not precious: "I don't know what I'm meant to be doing," Kay confesses to Sam when they first arrive at Edna's empty house. "I think you're doing it," her daughter simply replies.

Similar in certain ways to fellow Aussie filmmaker Jennifer Kent's "The Babadook," another horror film concerning the symbolic weight of what we may call "domestic terror," James' film has to do with the legacy of our lives, the way in which we treat those who brought us into the world, and the endlessly repeating cycle of birth/life/death, that marks our time on this plane of existence. What we do here, and how we treat those who came before us, has a lot to do with the lives our children will lead as well. In that sense, even set as a sort of grotesquerie, the ending comes at us from a place of acceptance: Best to accept our fate, as terrifying as it may seem, and embrace the process, then fight uselessly against its irresistible current.

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‘Relic’

88 Cast: Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote, Robyn Nevin,

Chris Bunton, Jeremy Stanford, Steve Rodgers

Director: Natalie Erika James

Rating: R, for some horror violence/disturbing images and language

Running time: 1 hour, 29 minutes

Available for rental through streaming video-on-demand platforms.

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