Like most recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from a personal showcase to a virtual one. Despite the change, we will still provide you with reviews and insights on some of the most interesting experiences we find, from indie movies to VR experiments.
Censorship is the bane of artists, but it’s also a grudging compliment – because to be a dedicated censor, you have to believe that art has power. That belief is the dark heart of Censor, a horror film about the most notorious horror movie moral panic in the world.
Censor, premiering this week at the Sundance Film Festival, is the feature film debut of Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond. Set in 1980s Britain at the height of the ‘video nasties’ controversy, which featured dozens of films – some by now iconic names like Dario Argento and David Cronenberg, others from directors who quickly were forgotten – banned or otherwise censored for their brutal violence and sex.
Enid (Niamh Algar) is a screener with the British film ratings agency, a small team that stands between heartfelt citizens and mind-blowing schlock. She handles her job with weary resignation, seemingly unmoved by constant simulated blood and the occasional grinning producer. Subsequently, a film she approved would presumably lead to murder and spark a firestorm in the press. An enigmatic slasher film brings back memories of her long-lost sister, whose disappearance haunted Enid and her parents for years. Her life is beginning to unravel.
Censor acknowledges the almost inherent funniness of movie content ratings – the process of looking dry over trashy exploitation and recommending arbitrary cuts to breakup and evisceration scenes, trying to find out exactly how much eating face is aesthetically defensible in a work of art. Whereas the real “video nasties” list contained gems like Argento’s Suspiria and Cronenberg’s Scanners, Censor is more concerned about the deluge of tacky, budget-less projects traded on sheer shock. The centerpiece is a fictional, almost plotless work entitled Don’t go into the church a nod to the horror filmmakers’ favorite assignment to the public.
But Censor is much creepier than campy. While the ending doesn’t deliver the incredibly effective setup, Algar catches Enid’s hollow eyes, growing exhaustion as she tries to solve a mystery that no one else believes in. Paparazzi and anonymous phone calls are ruining her sanity. Ordinary spaces become subtly menacing, like Enid’s desolate apartment and the vague, almost tangibly musty classification society.
With the video’s panic long gone, it’s easier to have sympathy for the censor, a figure long derided as a heartless squeamish or comedic scolding. The film explores a scarier idea: cinematic sin-eaters like Enid see a blurred line between reality and fiction, and under the wrong circumstances, they can lose sight of those lines altogether. How much longer Censor the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between his actual story and his fictional films in the film.
That these movies look a bit bad makes only Censor more effective. Plenty of horror explores the premise that movies drive people mad, like John Carpenter’s Cigarette burns or the 2018 mockumentary Antrum. There is nothing special about the video nasties here – but audiences imbue them with power just as well.
Ultimately, the enemy of the movie board isn’t the director behind a seedy slasher. It’s the boy who endlessly rewinds and repeats a fleeting moment of blood loss, or the criminal who is inspired by mere assumptions about what’s in a movie, or the tabloid who translates those assumptions into a scandal. Because in Censor, art only gives people permission to leave reality behind. It has no control over where they end up.