Mark Reviews Movies: RELIC

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 2, 2020

For a while, Relic gives the impression of a fairly straightforward horror story. An elderly woman with signs of dementia goes missing. Her family arrives at the woman's home to figure out where she has gone.

Did she lose her way after a trip somewhere? Did she simply wander off, unaware of her surroundings, and is she now lost in the woods outside the house? Is someone else involved? The woman has added multiple locks to certain doors in the house, and before her disappearance, she mentioned that she was convinced someone or something was entering her home at night. Her daughter wrote it off as the imaginations of a slipping mind, but now, maybe there was something to her claims. That only adds to the daughter's guilt.

There's a lot of guilt here, some of it shown in moments when the daughter is alone, such as when she sobs after visiting an assisted living facility, but most of it hidden away like some dirty secret. That's the thing about guilt. It can expand upon itself. The very feeling of guilt—for example, in how the daughter has left her widowed mother alone in this house for years to stew in loneliness and isolation—can be a reason to feel even guiltier. It's almost a form of self-pity, and in a situation like this, the daughter might start thinking that her mother, not herself, is the person for whom she should be feeling sorry. That's just another layer of guilt to add upon the rest.

Co-writer/director Natalie Erika James' film is sneaky in this way. It sets up various expectations for the direction in which it's heading, only to repeatedly shatter them by way of revealing the characters' deepest feelings and fears.

At first, we think it's one kind of mystery, about where Edna (Robyn Nevin) has disappeared and how and why. James and Christian White's screenplay follows the woman's daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) as they do what they can—contacting the police, participating in a search party, looking for clues around the house, waiting around for Edna to return when all else fails and there's nothing to do during the long nights. In the night, there are strange creaks and groans and thumps sounding throughout the house and in its very walls. Such noises are setting up the film's long game, both in terms of unnerving atmosphere and the concept that someone—or something—may be in the house with them.

Most of it, though, is kept low-key. "I don't know what I'm supposed to doing," Kay confesses to her daughter on the occasion of one of those breaks from activity. Sam, quite wisely, consoles her mother that this—the waiting, the hoping, the being present even in Edna's absence—is what she's supposed to be doing.

The screenplay subtly establishes the relationship between one mother, who is absent, and daughter, while it more explicitly shows the bond between that daughter and her own. While at the police station, Kay admits that it has been a few weeks since she last contacted her mother, whose disappearance was related to her by a neighbor who has been keeping track of Edna. There's a terrible irony in this, which seems to define much of the film's opening section: Kay hasn't been there for her mother, and now that the daughter is there, Edna is nowhere to be seen.

The first of the film's many shifts in established expectations arrives sooner than we might anticipate. Edna returns. She seems fine, both physically, besides a bruise on her chest, and mentally, beyond not remembering where she has been for several days. Kay tries to figure out what to do about her mother. Sam offers to move in with her grandmother. Edna's mood changes without warning, while her memory becomes more and more unreliable.

The noises in the house abate, but then there's the matter of a strange closet, which seems to hold some kind of terrific sway over anyone who approaches it or, as in the case of a neighbor child whom Edna locked in there during a game of hide-and-seek, who has the misfortune of being in there for any length of time. Edna becomes convinced that someone—or something—is hiding under her bed and, like a timid and frightened child, asks Kay to look. Something seems to move, but is it real or just Kay's mind, haunted by nightmares of her mother dying alone in a cabin on the property that was razed decades ago, playing tricks on her?

James digs deeper and deeper into the story's horror elements as it progresses, bathing the house in shadow, while focusing on some nasty black mold on the walls and ramping up the discomfort of physical pain being inflicted on and by the characters. Because she and Christian have so firmly established a series of mysteries about the possible nature and past of this house, we go along with them. We await the moment that the significance of a stained glass window, a photo album that Edna feels compelled to bury in the forest, and those noises and that closet will be revealed—and, with the answers, reveal the central mystery of the house. Meanwhile, the shakiness of these relationships, injured by guilt and uncertainty but wounded to the core by Edna's failing mind, becomes clearer and more tragic.

The biggest and most significant expectation-shattering aspect of this film is how James, fully embracing the concept of a haunted house and the grisly sights of the human body being injured or rotting to the flesh, employs these horror elements to arrive at a more intimate and, hence, more terrifying examination of the consequences of Edna's mental deterioration. To explain it in any detail would be both unfair, because it genuinely is a surprise, and almost impossible, because James is working on a level of metaphor that can only be felt, not rationalized. How else can one explain the penultimate moment, in which the film's most gruesome sight becomes a heartbreaking scene of tenderness?

To be clear, Relic is undoubtedly a horror tale, but it's founded upon an incomprehensible reality and very real fears. The only way to make a modicum of sense of such things is to portray them as horrifically as they feel.

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