Relic (2020)
Directed by Natalie Erika James
When elderly mother Edna inexplicably vanishes, her daughter rushes to the family's decaying home, finding clues of her increasing dementia scattered around the house in her absence.
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37 films that influenced Relic
What critics say influenced Relic
Esta no es la tradicional familia norteamericana armoniosa y unida contra la adversidad que nos vendió Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper, 1982), sino que deja al descubierto las miserias, las debilidades y las fracturas de sus protagonistas, de manera similar a lo que hicieran Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014) y Hereditary (Ari Aster, 2018).
Just like the nonsensical stuff that plagues Hereditary, Relic doesn’t play by its own rules.
From 2014's The Babadook to 2o18's Hereditary to The Lodge earlier this year, this sub-genre is here to stay, and Natalie Erika James' Relic deserves a spot among the best of them.
It’s less ambitious and aggressively complicated than, say, Ari Aster’s Hereditary —another movie about the sometimes-unnerving complexity of parent-child bonds—but it’s also, in the end, more thoughtful.
While Relic is too measured and its frights too oblique to have the same popular impact as the similar Hereditary, it shows James’ ability to use genre to confront uncomfortable truths.
Directed by Natalie Erika James , who also wrote the script along with Christian White, Relic effectively weaves in elements from Hereditary and The Visit to deliver a terrifying tale that tugs at the heartstrings.
From 2014's The Babadook to 2o18's Hereditary to The Lodge earlier this year, this sub-genre is here to stay, and Natalie Erika James' Relic deserves a spot among the best of them.
Some fit squarely in the horror genre, like Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook or Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
It’s a sophisticated and confident debut feature by filmmaker Natalie Erika James whose distinctive voice ensures that Relic holds its own against films that employ a similar approach to horror and personal trauma such The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), The Orphanage (JA Bayona, 2007) or even older classics such as Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973).
With fantastic effects work and dark lighting that never caused your eyes to strain, Relic is superb and earns its spot next to Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook when it comes to processing human emotion and fear through horror.
(It especially echoes works like Hereditary and The Babadook.)
Between The Babadook, Hereditary and Us, the premise has evolved from a log line – mom must protect her kids from a demon – into its own sub-genre.
In addition to the subset of tales that use family drama to drive the story, movies like Get Out and The Witch allowed storytellers to make their voices known.
It is so assured and well-crafted that it should be discussed alongside Get Out, The Witch and Hereditary as an equally masterful debut.
The 2010s in particular saw an increase in this trope: The unhinged sundowning Nana in The Visit, the baby-snatching sorceress in The Witch, the Scandinavian cult’s nude female elders in Midsommar, the deceptive old lady whose nude jaunt around her kitchen was distinctly unsettling in IT: Chapter 2. These examples, among countless other jump-scare-inducing characters, embody traits symbolizing the crone—an unsightly old hag who often represents death incarnate.
Relic is the sort of astonishingly polished and haunting first-time feature that marks its writer-director as an immediately vital talent in the genre, a debut that can stand alongside the likes of The Babadook (2014), The Witch (2015), and Get Out (2017).
Like other recent horror films (I dislike the term “elevated horror” since the genre at its finest doesn’t need that distinction) such as The Babadook , Hereditary and The Witch , Relic works so well because of its complete cohesion between characters, theme and imagery.
The horror genre is one rife with potential to cover more dramatic topics in powerful fashion and some have done so with flying colors, such as both of Ari Aster’s previous works and Robert Eggers’ The Witch, while some have faltered at one or the other in balancing the terror with the story’s themes.
In league with recent items by Jennifer Kent and Ari Aster, James, like Rose Glass and Romola Garai, has concocted an art-house mood piece which recalls the 1940s era of Val-Lewton films, particularly those B-pictures directed by Jacques Tourneur, like Cat People (1942) or The Leopard Man (1943), which were predicated on horrific flights of fancy but depended upon imbalance and unease through the power of suggestion and the playful teasing of troubling imagery.
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Ghostwatch, the 1992 TV movie that took the form of a fake ghost hunting broadcast, also evoked this feeling by hiding some images of its central ghost throughout like Easter eggs, leaving us always on guard and afraid of finding one.
In league with recent items by Jennifer Kent and Ari Aster, James, like Rose Glass and Romola Garai, has concocted an art-house mood piece which recalls the 1940s era of Val-Lewton films, particularly those B-pictures directed by Jacques Tourneur, like Cat People (1942) or The Leopard Man (1943), which were predicated on horrific flights of fancy but depended upon imbalance and unease through the power of suggestion and the playful teasing of troubling imagery.
Emblematic of this duality of desire and revulsion is the scene in The Shining when the beautiful bather in room 247 morphs into a decaying, cackling crone in Jack Torrance’s arms.
Endless piles of linen and boxes of photographs and random trinkets increasingly build a maze both literal and psychological of sorts, and the spatial incongruities of this home is drenched with complexities that would make Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining blush.
Overhead shots á la The Shining , provide a Kubrickian feel and continue the unsettling mood that was created by James from the opening scene.
What the film needed was to hit a pitch that got characters reacting the way Geena Davis did in The Fly when she discovered she was pregnant to Brundle-fly, or when Shelley Duvall in The Shining read the first draft of her husband’s manuscript.
Fans of The Shining and Hereditary will appreciate Relic’s fusion of fraught family drama with haunted house creeper that hinges on powerful performances by Emily Mortimer ( Mary Poppins Returns ), Robyn Nevin ( Top of the Lake ) and Bella Heathcote ( The Neon Demon ).
That sort of thing has been a joke for almost a century; in the silent version of “The Cat and the Canary”(1927), an anxious guest, in a creaky mansion, kneels down to take a similar peek.
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We’ve seen in previous films that there is a real-life horror show that comes along with aging (it has been recently explored in genre movies like M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit or Adam Robitel’s The Taking of Deborah Logan ), but I think what James does here is a bit more moody and subtle, allowing the unease of what these characters are dealing with to seep into viewers as she prepares to unleash some unexpected terrors later on, and the results are enthralling.
Really, in recent years, it's been Relic and slow-burn cult favorite The Taking of Deborah Logan, and that's pretty much it.
The story is certainly a topic previously touched upon in other films, namely in the chilling found footage project The Taking of Deborah Logan, but it’s handled in a much more poignant and haunting fashion in Relic than in most other efforts.
Director Natalie Erika James’ Australian feature Relic , sees such truths play out in the most haunting and affecting way imaginable, in a sensational debut feature that has the enveloping feel of Hereditary , but is like The Taking of Deborah Logan meets The Babadook , by way of David Cronenberg.
The elderly have been portrayed as creepy in numerous horror films, from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit to The Taking of Deborah Logan .
It should not be confused with The Relic , a fun, dumb 1997 creature feature.