Mark Reviews Movies: CENSOR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 10, 2021

In the end, Censor isn't about its more tantalizing and thoughtful ideas. Those consider the link—or the lack thereof—between real-world violence and the kind we see in the movies, as well as the mindset of someone who makes it her job and, indeed, her goal in life to keep such violent material from others. Co-writer/director Prano Bailey-Bond's movie is set in the United Kingdom at some point during the 1980s, when journalists, politicians, and government officials freely connected violent movies to real crime. These "video nasties," so-called because the often cheaply produced content was released directly to VHS, became a public controversy and the target of severe censorship.

The story revolves around one of those censors, a quiet and reserved woman named Enid (Niamh Algar), who has gained a reputation around the censorship office as being one of the stricter—if not the strictest—of her peers. Nothing rattles her. No number of decapitations or amount of gouged eyes or depiction of evisceration affects her—partly because she knows it's fake (The office will often laugh at the phoniest special effects, like sausages used for intestines), partly because she has taught herself to keep the material at a professional distance, partly because she personally knows the horrors of the real world.

These movies amount to nothing in the bigger picture of crime and violence, but simultaneously, if there's even a chance that cutting a scene of murder or rape will prevent something similar from occurring now or in the future in the real life, Enid will order that edit without any questions. In her mind, Enid's job isn't to censor. It's to protect.

Bailey-Bond's screenplay, co-written with Anthony Fletcher, clearly understands this world and succinctly gives us a sense of Enid, not as some prudish busybody (although she certainly dresses to give that impression), but as someone with genuine concern, real fear, and a feeling that the weight of the good or ill of society rests upon her shoulders. This isn't some satire or critique of the misguided aims of censorship. Bailey-Bond and Fletcher get that point out of the way quickly, when one of Enid's co-workers, watching then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher rail against the video nasties, says that the government's cutting of social programs is doing the real harm to society. Another scene on television, of police beating labor strikers, suggests that targeting the video nasties serves as a deflection from the government's own willingness to enact violence.

The movie is, though, a sympathetic and sometimes insightful study of Enid, who finds her ability to compartmentalize the horrors on screen from her own experience dwindling. Whether or not that examination pays off in a satisfying, smart, or subversive way doesn't seem to be the filmmakers' primary concern, as surreal and formally intriguing as that payoff may be.

All of Enid's immediate issues begin for a few reasons. First, her parents (played by Clare Holman and Andrew Havil) inform Enid that they have had her sister, who disappeared when the two were children, officially declared dead. Enid cannot remember what happened to her younger sister, only that the two were playing in the woods that fateful day, but pieces of those memories start returning to her.

Second, a trio of vicious murders is making headlines: A man beheaded his wife and killed his two children. The newspapers and TV news reports, though, are focusing on how similar the killings were to a particular video nasty, and somehow, a journalist has learned that Enid is one who let the scene pass by the censorship board.

Finally, Enid is assigned a new movie to review. It features two sisters walking through the forest, playing a game, and arriving at a cabin in the woods. Enid is made visibly uncomfortable by the familiar storyline and images—and that's even before the elder sister takes an axe to the younger one. That sends Enid on a hunt for the movie's mysterious director, as well as its star Alice Lee (Sophia La Porta), who looks as if she could be Enid's sister.

Bailey-Bond's approach to this story mostly evades violence, save for an encounter with a slimy movie producer (played by Michael Smiley) and the events of the reality-blurring climax, and creates an air of discomfort. That comes both from the dim, grim aura of the locales (Cinematographer Annika Summerson provides an atmosphere of enveloping isolation within the sterile censorship office, an empty subway station, and Enid's apartment, awash in the glow of a TV showing the mystery director's previous work) and from the mounting levels and degrees of Enid's guilt—real or perceived and remembered or imagined. This is first and foremost a mood piece, as much about Enid's state of mind as the notion that the character's quest will lead her to some terrible, hidden truths about her past—and herself.

Until it's time for the filmmakers to pay off those mysteries, the movie works for the most part, thanks to Algar's internalized performance and Bailey-Bond's embrace of matters more psychological than sinister. As for where Censor ultimately heads, there's some to admire (how the finale, which forces Enid to confront her past by way of the apparent safety of a movie production, mixes formats and juxtaposes fantasy with reality), but it mostly leaves us with a lingering sense of missed possibility.

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