Relic (2020) is a profoundly disturbing Australian film that tackles the horror of aging more effectively than any other film I’ve seen. Indeed, it exemplifies how horror film as a genre is uniquely adept at exploring—at making its viewers viscerally feel—the things that really scare us.
The first full-length feature for director Natalie Erika James, who also co-wrote the film with Christian White, Relic features an astounding performance by Robyn Nevin as Edna, an elderly woman living alone in a large house and suffering from worsening dementia. She wanders her house, which is filled with tangible signs of all her memories, and yet she struggles to remember things—who the people are in her photographs, whether they are real or not, alive or not, and even who she is: the camera finds a label on which is written “My name is Edna.”
Check out the trailer for Relic:
The film opens with a more catastrophic memory loss as Edna’s daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) arrive at her house after a neighbor reports he hasn’t seen Edna in a few days. The police are called in and a search ensues, but, after three days, Edna just appears back in her kitchen with no memory of where she’s been.
Relic’s plot—and it’s a minimal one—tracks Edna’s spiraling dementia and the efforts of both Kay and Sam to understand and accept her illness and learn how to care for her. The film makes it clear how difficult this is as Edna frequently fails to recognize them—she mistakes her granddaughter for her daughter more than once; conversely, Edna becomes unrecognizable to Kay and Sam. Some of the most chilling moments in the film are when Edna turns to look at Kay or Sam and her eyes are hauntingly blank. Edna also turns into a different person—cold, angry and violent—and these moments too are horrifying. She gives Sam a valuable ring in one scene but then rips it back in fury in a later scene and accuses Sam of stealing it. And then in another scene, she threatens Sam with a knife and screams at her: “Get out. It’s my room, my house”—as if Sam is an utter stranger.
The three generations of women in Relic: Edna (Robyn Nevin), Kay (Emily Mortimer) and Sam (Bella Heathcote)
James is, though, not only making a film about dementia but a horror film about dementia. Relic thus expresses the psychological horror of a woman losing who she is (and thus losing her connection to those she loves) by means of an inexorably encroaching supernatural horror. Relic effectively employs the metaphor of the decaying house, for instance, and the connection between decaying house and body: black mold spreads over the house at the same time that a dark bruise spreads over Edna’s skin. (James uses mold here as a hybrid natural and supernatural presence in a way that evokes both Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House [2018] and Osgood Perkins I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House [2016].) The black mold is especially pervasive in a part of the house that seems explicitly unreal, rooms and hallways that are unfamiliar to the women, and in which Sam gets lost at one point. Sam’s terrifying disorientation in the house she thought she knew is a very physical way of rendering her equally terrifying disorientation as the grandmother she loves slowly disappears, even as her body remains.
Kay (Emily Mortimer)
At other moments, James does a fantastic job of uncannily blurring what may be the manifestations of dementia with the signs of a haunting—an eerily thumping, empty washer, open doors, Edna muttering apparently to an invisible entity. In one scene, Edna stares at Kay with a particularly blank expression – and then turns away and urinates on the floor. It’s a moment that evokes the possessed Regan McNeil in The Exorcist (1973)– and yet all that most likely “possesses” Edna is her disease.
The supernatural elements that James harnesses in Relic to express this physiological illness, which attacks body and brain, render an experience of dementia that is, as I have said, horrifying; it’s hard to watch this film and not feel both terror and enormous compassion for all three women—the sufferer herself and those that love her. And as the “monstrousness” that centers on Edna grows through the film, the ending is not what you might expect. Indeed the ending is a radical revision of the conventional horror film ending, embodying less an expulsion than an acceptance of the horror.
Relic will inevitably be compared to Adam Robitel’s wonderful 2014 film, The Taking of Deborah Logan, which we loved. (Check out our review here – and our piece on Sara Logan as Final Girl here.) The two films are quite different – and Deborah Logan, in the end, dives into more explicit horror than does Relic. Our view: they are both eminently worth watching.
Follow Horror Homeroom on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
You can stream Relic on Amazon:
