Psychological horror does a good line in blurring the line between reality and delusion, in featuring protagonists who aren’t sure if what they’re experiencing is real or not. And horror films (alongside other forms of popular entertainment) have been singled out as inspiration for real-life violence for decades. The argument is that people cannot distinguish reality from fantasy, and so seek to reenact horror films in real life. For this reason, the argument goes, horror films should be restricted or banned, in order to protect the public. In my (cynical) experience, it’s rarely if ever truly about public safety. Generally it’s a convenient way to gin up outrage or to present someone as a moral exemplar ahead of a political campaign or a fundraising effort. It’s not about horror movies, it’s about something else. Horror movies are just a useful proxy.
Censor is a genuinely unsettling psychological horror film that directly engages with these ideas, and doesn’t insult the audience’s intelligence in the process.
It’s set in Thatcher-era Britain, the early 1980s. It’s a time of extensive civil unrest and increasing suppression. More to the point for this film, it’s the height of the “video nasty” era of film censorship, and we follow Enid Baines, a censor at the British Board of Film Classification. It’s the job of her and her colleagues to screen films, impose a rating, and recommend edits that make the film compliant with obscenity guidelines. She and her colleagues have to watch a lot of what were colloquially termed “video nasties” - exploitation films high on graphic violence and low on production value, intended for distribution directly to video rental places.
Enid is good at her job. She’s thoughtful, careful, determined to make the right decisions. She takes the idea that these films are potentially corrupting and dangerous at its word, and she’s passionate about protecting people. It’s personal for her. Her sister Nina disappeared without a trace when they were both very young. It’s haunted her ever since. And she has a lot of stress in her life - her parents are having Nina declared dead, a recent murder case is tied by the tabloid press back to a film that Enid passed for certification and so now she’s getting nasty phone calls at all hours and the press are camped outside her job. And she just finished screening a film called Don’t Go Into The Church, a film with scenes that looked suspiciously like childhood memories of hers. She would have sworn one of the actresses looked familiar too.
She looks a lot like Nina.
The central conceit, then, is that we have someone who job it is to protect people from confusing fantasy and reality finding that the line between fantasy and reality is blurring. In this sense, it treads some of the same ground as Berberian Sound Studio. Both feature protagonists in hostile environments - in Berberian Sound Studio, it’s being alone in a foreign country, and for Enid it’s being mired in the controversy around a recent classification. Both protagonists are also immersed in violent films - as part of the production in Berberian Sound Studio, and here as a viewer - and it both cases it’s taking a psychological toll. The biggest difference here is that Berberian Sound Studio was a much more restrained, cerebral film. There’s something much more disturbing about what happens to Enid as the film goes on. It’s very much a slow burn - everything starts to go sideways so gradually, beginning with nightmare segments and then the gradual intrusion of repeated motifs, the contrast between Enid’s perspective and others’ becoming more sharp as the film goes on, that you don’t realize just how far gone Enid is until it’s much too late.
Like I said last week, dealing with your nightmares by denying and suppressing them doesn’t end well, and Enid cannot bring herself to face her nightmares, to confront what happened all of those years ago, and the film, to its credit, keeps a lot of things unexplained and unresolved. We get hints, clues, possibilities, but Enid won’t admit to herself what happened, and we experience most of the film from Enid’s perspective, so we never know for sure ourselves. The possibilities, the glimpses, the stuff we get around the edges, they’re disturbing, but it’s also hard to tell how much of that is the reality of what happened and how much is Enid excoriating herself for things out of her control. Again, there are no easy answers to be had, and the interweaving of Enid’s life with both the films she’s investigating and her own internal psychological landscape is intuitive and seamless, making the final act really, really unnerving.
The production is handled skillfully - as I said above, it reminds me a lot of Berberian Sound Studio, and that’s as much about the aesthetic as narrative similarities. Like that film it’s a period piece dominated by primary-color lighting and drab environments, longer takes that focus on the minutiae of everyday workplace behavior and highlight the ways in which the protagonist is sort of an outsider. Although the censors aren’t portrayed unsympathetically - they’re not strident moralists for the most part, they’re doing a job, and they mostly seem to have a wry distance on the films they’re watching - some of them do seem to see Enid as being a little too strict and serious about it. They’re friendly enough, but there’s a bit of a chummy boys’ club atmosphere to the place, and you get the sense that she doesn’t have too many friends. There are lots of shots of Enid on her own, walking back to her tiny, drab apartment, and even at work she’s generally pictured apart from her colleagues. It underlines an alienation that only gets worse as the film goes on.
It’s also really good at using contrasting cinematic vocabularies to describe what’s happening. Video nasties were low-budget exploitation films, high on graphic violence and low on production value, meant to titillate and shock, and they’re recreated very faithfully throughout - honestly, I’m not sure how much is recreated and how much is archival footage, it’s damn near impossible to tell. So we start with glimpses of the films Enid is screening - grainy, garish, obviously made on the cheap - and as the film goes on, their presence makes itself known in increasingly intrusive ways without being too literal about what’s happening. It’s the blurring of the line between film and reality, and it isn’t even really necessarily that noticeable until the point where you realize how much it’s swallowed up everything
It’s sort of a truism that the most vehemently moralistic have all kinds of skeletons in their own closets, but here it seems less a case of rank hypocrisy and more that this is how Enid is processing her trauma. She can’t bring herself to face what happened to Nina, she’s deeply in denial, so she sublimates it into her work as a censor. She couldn’t protect or save her sister, so she’s going to protect and save everyone else instead. But putting that level of denial in an environment suffused with violence, being constantly exposed to graphic violence as a viewer, well, those aren’t going to mix well, and in Enid’s case it makes for a nightmarish downward spiral from which we get little relief and even less closure. It’s thoughtful, powerful stuff.
IMDB entry
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