Review: CENSOR

Enid is a censor working at the BBFC during the video nasties era of the mid '80s. When one of the films she has passed for release is linked to a murder she finds she has been exposed through a leak to public attention, resulting in a barrage of angry phone calls and a gutter press campaign. As if that weren't enough, her parents have officially declared her sister, missing since childhood, dead. Big deal? Enid has lived with a lifelong guilt that she might have been the cause of the girl's abduction. An encounter with a notorious producer of video nasties and the viewing of one of his nastier videos triggers a confabulation that he, too, might have something to do with the disappearance. So, off she goes on a quest into territory that might not even be real. 

Censor is one of a small number of films that ask questions about cinema by putting their characters directly in the path of its power. Similar territory was covered in Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio wherein a part of the production team of an ultra violent horror film undergoes a strange personal transformation. Enid's passage from a controller of extreme culture to a potential victim of it might be seen as the kind of ironic turn that the Twilight Zone was built on but there's a creeping theme on show here. As Enid's prim appearance gets progressively shabbier and the film's pallet toward the gaudier of '80s the notion of control shifts from the censor to the film producers and finally (without spoilers) to those who might keep the circle spinning by opposing the production. This ranges from some black humour kills to the appearance of a VCR remote in Enid's hand at a point of severe stress. Finally, the utopianism that both sides of the censorship debate would claim coalesce in a radio news broadcast that is as creepy as a musical box tune in an old horror movie.

Niamh Algar (who kept reminding me of Samantha Morton) gives us an Enid who seems starched up until you see her at work, calmly noting acts of extreme gore and making recommendations. When the parts of her professionalism begin to crumble her performance sails into the kind of personal disintegration more typical of a Cronenberg character like in Videodrome or Dead Ringers and Algar's intensity transmits the same kind of anxiety in us. It's a turn remarkable for its subtlety until the end when it needs to explode which it does.

On that, Censor steers carefully away from giving in to its McGuffin too early. Those expecting a kind of horror satire with a lot of ironic violence will be disappointed; writer/director Prano Bailey Bond has mercifully avoided the temptation to make a video nasty hiding under cultural commentary. What we have is much more engaging; cinema that asks questions about cinema while being accomplished cinema.

Censor is currently available through Prime (it didn't get a cinema release in Australia)