Review: 'Censor' is a smart and scary horror tale that also comments on the 'video nasties' panic of the '80s.
The smartly spooky Welsh-made shocker “Censor” shows that it’s possible to comment on the horror genre while still making a movie that will scare the crap out of you.
It’s the early ‘80s in Great Britain, in the era of Margaret Thatcher, and Enid Baines (played by Irish actress Niamh Algar) works for the government agency that censors and rates movies. It’s the age of “video nasties,” cheaply made horror whose gore is so abundant that it’s set off a moral panic in the tabloid press — and when an accused killer is linked to a movie Enid and her colleagues approved, the press hordes start hounding her.
Then a new horror movie comes in for screening, and it’s disturbing to Enid in ways beyond the usual guts and gore. Enid becomes convinced that the lead actress (Sophia La Porta) is the adult version of Enid’s sister, Nina, who disappeared when she was 7 years old — when a 10-year-old Enid was with her. When Enid can’t convince her parents, who have taken steps to have Nina declared legally dead, Enid decides she has to find the film’s enigmatic director (Adrian Schiller), who is now filming another movie that eerily parallels Nina’s disappearance.
In her feature debut, director/co-writer Prano Bailey-Bond (who wrote the script with Anthony Fletcher) finds delicious tension in following the straitlaced Enid descend into madness and mayhem. It helps that Algar, last seen by American audiences in Guy Ritchie’s recent heist thriller “Wrath of Man,” is so compelling to watch as Enid slowly unravels.
Interestingly, for a movie that delves into “video nasties,” the gore is judiciously applied — except for an early montage of ‘80s-style splatter films and a fairly gruesome finale. Bailey-Bond proves that what we think is happening on the screen is infinitely more terrifying than onscreen bloodshed, and allows the scariest parts of the movie to play out within the viewer’s head.
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‘Censor’
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, June 11, in select theaters; on demand June 18. Not rated, but probably R for violence, gore, sexual situations and language. Running time: 84 minutes.