Sundance Film Festival movie review: 'Censor'
(Image courtesy of Sundance Film Festival)
The anachronistic horror flick 'Censor' (world premieres at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival) cribs from the gratuitously ultraviolent torture porn subgenre to distort a traumatized woman's tenuous grasp on reality.
In short: After viewing a strangely familiar video nasty, film censor Enid (Niamh Algar) sets out to solve the mystery of her sister's disappearance.
This stylized horror throwback transparently has two objectives: track Enid's deteriorating psyche and as a love letter to a forbidden, bygone subgenre of film. Filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond and star Niamh Algar succeeds in the former - but rather than be a deferential nod to exploitation flicks, 'Censor' is a gushing love letter to a very specific cinema niche.
From the outset, Enid is a put-together, precise and rather dispassionate movie censor. She seems completely detached as she almost scientifically watches absurdly violent movies, noting which scenes and violent acts need to be trimmed down. But once the germ of an idea takes hold in Enid's mind, Algar delicately transforms from a somewhat uptight censor ... into a woman slowly, but surely, losing her grip on reality. Algar finds the perfect cross-section of Enid's guilt and suppressed trauma that fuels her downward spiral. This transformation is honestly the strongest aspect of 'Censor' and all due credit to Bailey-Bond and Algar for crafting this portrait of a survivor whose increasing obsession distorts her perspective.
It's transparently obvious co-writer/director Bailey-Bond loves the low-budget horror aesthetic of the "video nasty" flicks. But 'Censor' goes beyond just a work of reverence and veers into the realm of reproduction. Films like 'Mandy,' 'In Fabric' and even 'Extra Ordinary' found ways to stylistically honor their forerunners without just outright copying the formula wholesale. The meta nature of a film with a protagonist who makes a living by watching video nasty flicks only calls attention to this film's dogmatic adherence to the low-budget gore tropes. As the film progresses, the entire tone and tenor of 'Censor' gradually becomes more and more like that of a splatter film - until 'Censor' simply, unapologetically and unironically just becomes a splatter flick.
It's not merely that the content within 'Censor' is objectionable to the point of being distasteful - it's that this psychological horror flick is a terrible bore. This is largely due to the film’s poor pacing - it’s as if a compelling short film was stretched out to fill a feature-length film container. Any movie that's not even an hour and a half long but still feels too long is a film with fundamental pacing issues.
Imitation is a form of flattery, however, ‘Censor’ just straightforward copies the defining elements of “nasty videos.” The film, from start to finish, is just derivative of the taboo, old school splatter films of the grindhouse era - until 'Censor' just brazenly replicates cheap "special effects" and the "aged" look of a beat-up reel of film or damaged VHS tape. Even as the film itself warns against the numbing effect of exploitive gore as entertainment, 'Censor' proves that relentlessly beating the audience over the head with non-sequitur gore has a point of diminishing returns.
Final verdict: This film’s depiction of creeping madness is so engrossing that it almost completely offsets its slavish devotion to the splatter genre.
Score: 3/5
'Censor' screens at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. This horror film is not yet rated and has a running time of 84 minutes.
