Relic is about a mother and daughter who go to grandma’s house because grandma is missing, but when she turns up again, the real mystery begins. I can see viewers being really divided about this movie, which liberally uses horror tropes, but is short on providing explicit answers and perhaps over relies on the audience to fill in the holes. I would not call it a horror movie per se though it feels and acts like one.
Relic feels as if it accomplished what It Comes At Night tried to do, but the latter did not and enraged me. I am so lenient with this movie in a way that I would not be if I did not relate to the subject matter and characters so much. It addresses death, aging, ambiguous loss and generational divides and similarities in a viscerally, emotionally resonant way by using horror to communicate the natural physical and psychological progression some individuals and families go through as their roles and needs change over time.
Relic could not work without Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote and Robyn Nevin playing three generations of women. They evoke so much in their acting to convey that they are a family. Mortimer never comes off as cold, but instinctually protective, understandably flawed and continously reluctant to truly grapple with and face her fears. There are shades of resentment and envy in the way that she witnesses the way that the grandmother is gentler with the granddaughter, but she has the emotional intelligence to recognize when she is becoming brittle and changes course to say the stronger, more positive emotion. Her early scenes with Heathcote set the tone. Just when she seems like the nagging mother, she confesses the underlying, motivating fear. She shines as the character most prepared for this challenge. After watching Mary—poor woman keeps having to go to police stations to talk about her family, I was worried that she is stuck in a bad movie rut, and maybe you will still think that she is after watching Relic, but she is not the problem.
Nevin nails making an elderly woman terrifying. Anyone who thinks that women are not physical threats based on age and gender never had to deal with one for a long time. See Relic if you want to get a sense how quickly things can go south before you make jokes when someone who is clearly more physically dominant expresses fear from an aggressor who seems harmless. You cannot defend yourself, and you have to show concern over that person’s welfare while the seemingly helpless aggressor will not reciprocate.
Natalie Erika James cowrote and directed Relic. It is James’ first feature film, and she shows great visual and narrative promise, but still struggles with being able to see the story from the viewers’ point of view. She is so inside of the movie that James forgets that we do not know which elements are important or not so she focuses on an object as if it is important, but it takes ages, if we remember, to discover its true significance. Because of the global pandemic, I had no choice except to see the movie at home, and the images are not as clear and distinct as they may be on the big screen so I often had to pause, rewind and zoom (I saw the DVD copy, and it is a shortcoming of streaming) to recognize what object I was looking at or discern what a post-it note actually said. I then made a mental note and was rewarded for that attentiveness, but I do not think that she will communicate effectively with the average viewer who may miss a lot of detail and find the lack of visual clarity frustrating., which is not to imply that the film is not gorgeously shot. It is.
I rewatched a handful of Relic’s scenes, specifically when the grandmother is whispering to herself near the front door and someone comes downstairs to see what she is doing. There is clearly a shadowy figure that initially appears behind and somewhat in front as if it is a bannister, but then completely disappears. What was she trying to convey in that scene considering the denouement? What about under the bed? The movie could feel like a bait and switch for never explaining the phenomenon in more than a visual metaphor of a state of mind.
James composition of the shots is perfect. Once the grandma reappears, the interpersonal dynamic and individual psychological state are depicted visually. Emily Mortimer’s character, Kay, the mother and daughter, is the person that is usually fully seen with the exception of us watching her talk on the phone behind an opaque glass wall like a shower. I related to her character the most, and it is probably because of the way that she is shot. She is often isolated in the frame with other characters practically off screen or at the edges of her frame. Edna, the grandmother and mother is usually obscured by objects, reflected in mirrors or viewed through glass. When we see her head on, she is usually disturbing, threatening or eerie. Initially the granddaughter, Sam, is also aligned with her grandmother because she projects her issues with her mother on to her grandmother, but as the movie progresses, she recognizes the full import of how different they are and is utterly repulsed, which is depicted in the camera movement that makes it seem as if the staircase is infinite. James’ sense of overall rhythm, slow, languorous, incessant as if the film was constantly calmly breathing really sets the atmosphere of constant dread. Shots feel as if someone is furtively peering at the characters, i.e. us. In many ways, we are all the monsters for using this family’s tragedy as entertainment.
Relic’s denouement worked for me for its counterintuitive, subversive response to narrative tropes in the way that it defines a perfect ending. It is not a happy one in the conventional sense, but it is more realistic in the way that it echoes the stages of grief and depicts acceptance. While James seems to care less about developing the original mythology to the horror themes in her story as the emotional trajectory of her characters, I am willing to forgive her prioritization (a great horror film can multitask and do both) and praise her for creating a more approachable, quotidian horror story than Hereditary, a masterpiece that addresses generational pain that is rooted in abuse. Sometimes ordinary life can be scary.
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In Relic, Kay’s great grandfather died alone in a cabin in the woods, which is where the family house currently sits. The house and physical body of the oldest inhabitant reflects the internal emotional state of that inhabitant so because Edna is getting older and naturally deteriorating, the house is also getting distorted. Think of the novel, House of Leaves. Why do these people get old and gradually become wizened, tiny decaying leaf people? I do not think that James is trying to say that this family is not human, but used horror effects to represent the real life horror of the effects of aging and death, which is a fine choice, but could supremely piss off people looking for more from this story.
