Natalie Erika James (2020)
Most of the Australian film Relic takes place in an old dark house. The camera sneaks curiously around it. Two of the three main characters, Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote), explore more nervously. The house is old in the sense of belonging to the same family for several generations; it’s now the home of the third principal, Kay’s mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), an elderly widow. The place is dark in a very literal sense. In the prologue to Natalie Erika James’s debut feature, the murk is punctuated by candle flames and the fairy lights on a Christmas tree. But lamps and overhead lighting are in short supply – or, at least, infrequent use – throughout the film. No wonder it’s hard for Kay and Sam to find their way about. At one point, a power cut prompts an alarmed exclamation from Kay. In fact, the loss of electricity makes little difference.
The house has a remote setting, though there’s one other house nearby, and a shabby, almost abandoned look – a slack tennis net slumps in the grounds outside. Edna lives alone; the three women get together in her home in the aftermath of her temporary absence from it. Divorcee Kay, who lives and works in Melbourne, receives a phone call from a police officer (Steve Rodgers) that Edna’s neighbour has reported not seeing her for a few days. When Kay and Sam drive over to the house they find it empty. Edna’s disappearance is especially worrying because she’s recently shown increasing signs of forgetfulness. (There are post-its around the house with reminders to turn things on and off, and so on.) A police search in nearby woods is fruitless but Kay gets up one morning to see her mother in the kitchen making coffee. Edna behaves as if nothing has happened. A doctor (Catherine Glavicic) examines her and can find nothing seriously amiss. Edna is unwilling or unable, however, to explain where she’s been, or the large bruise on her chest.
Relic is the latest well-received horror movie to lay spooky atmosphere on thick from the start – the tenebrous visuals (the DP is Charlie Sarroff) accompanied by seething ominous music (by Brian Reitzell). It emerges from conversation about a book of sketches of how the property once looked that there was another dwelling on the site. Legend has it that the male ancestor who lived there got up to very dodgy things (not further described). After he died, his place was demolished but coloured glass from one of its windows was preserved and installed in what’s now Edna’s house. The camera is very taken with this piece of glass. Is it somehow linked to the things that go bump in the walls, which also are scarred by unexplained dark stains?
If the coloured glass is one candidate for the titular relic, Edna is certainly another. The oppressively eerie atmospherics are at first so dominant that you suspect Natalie Erika James (who also shares the screenplay credit, with Christian White) may be exploiting the old woman’s dementia for purposes of audience disorientation – as one of her means to the end of supernatural explanation. What makes Relic distinctive, a main reason why it’s attracting critical praise, is that almost the reverse turns out to be the case. James uses the locale and tropes of horror cinema to dramatise the horror of dementia, and of seeing a loved one submerged in it. Hints of malign mystery like the dubious ancestor and the legacy of his pane of glass are red herrings. The sinister emblems of decay in the house are expressions of Edna’s deterioration.
An early hint of this comes when Kay, unbeknown to Edna, visits a Melbourne retirement home with a view to putting her mother in it. Except for the upbeat spiel of the staff member showing Kay round, the place is silent as the grave. Its residents, notably an old man (John Browning) whose lost eyes gaze up at Kay, are ghostlike. (This sequence would stand out even more sharply if James didn’t make everywhere in the film look desolate.) As the story proceeds, Edna’s amnesiac aggression, verbal and physical, moves increasingly centre stage. Her post-it messages take an allusive turn: an anguished scrawl of ‘Keep it out!’ refers to the disease invading her; there’s a final consolatory reminder that ‘I am loved’. As her mind disintegrates, Edna starts to dismantle her body, scratching her chest bruise until it putrefies, picking at her face with a knife blade. In Relic’s closing scene, Kay helps her mother remove her withered hair and rotting flesh until Edna is reduced to a corpse that brings to mind Sylvia Plath’s phrase ‘black as burnt turkey’ (in ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’). Kay lies down beside Edna and touches her tenderly. As Sam joins them on the ground, she notices a tiny black bruise – a telltale doom mark – on the nape of Kay’s neck.
Enthusiastic reviews have majored on Natalie Erika James’s fusion of grisliness and compassion. For Stephanie Zacharek, ‘This is a horror movie with a soul’. Mark Kermode sees ‘plenty to scare but much more to make you care’. Nicole Davis thinks Relic unprecedented in film drama in that it ‘gets to the heart of what it means to watch a loved one lose their mind to dementia’. James has relevant personal experience of the disease, through her grandmother, but this kind of connection isn’t enough to absolve a film-maker of questionable taste or judgment (as Craig Roberts recently proved in Eternal Beauty (2019), supposedly an homage to his schizophrenic aunt).
Nicole Davis’s Guardian review is headlined ‘Facing the fear: cinema finally confronts the reality of dementia’. That may be a fair description of Dick Johnson Is Dead, Kirsten Johnson’s documentary about her father’s degenerative illness, which Davis’s piece also covers[1]. It’s not true of Relic. The realities of Alzheimer’s and the like include incontinence. In James’s film, Kay is aghast to see her mother discharging black urine on the floor. Isn’t uncontrolled peeing of the lighter-coloured variety distressing enough? To depict the dissolution of human personality by means of a human body that literally falls to pieces seems to me the opposite of ‘confronting the reality of dementia’: deploying the imagery of an essentially non-realistic film genre is, in effect, a distancing mechanism. Initially monotonous, Relic is eventually offensive in its macabre exaggerations of dementia’s awfulness.
James’s expressionism finally obliterates the slivers of dramatic realism evident in the early stages of the film. For a while, the dynamic of the three women is striking. Practically minded Kay has kept Edna at arm’s length until now, and has a fractious relationship with Sam. There’s a natural emotional rapport between grandmother and granddaughter absent from the relationship that either has with Kay, who is sadly excluded. As Edna’s condition worsens, these distinctions simply evaporate. As the house becomes a fully-fledged metaphor of the rot and chaos of Edna’s mind, Kay and Sam, too, find themselves trapped there. When Sam manages to shut herself in somewhere within the maze of rooms, she uses the torch on her mobile to find her way around but doesn’t think to try calling Kay elsewhere in the house to explain what’s happened.
Edna’s neighbour Alex (Jeremy Stanford), who reported her missing, has a young adult son, Jamie (Chris Bunton). Jamie has Down Syndrome and Alex hasn’t let him visit Edna’s house since a game of hide and seek with her went badly wrong. She forgot it was going on and locked Jamie in the cupboard where he was hiding, and remained for several hours. Whether alive or (in the case of Edna’s suspicious forebear) dead, male characters in Relic count for little: the main purpose of Sam’s conversations with Jamie and Alex is to deliver the revelation about the hide and seek incident. Even so, these brief exchanges, which take place just outside the house, are a breath of air in more ways than one. The low-key natural playing of them suggests, like nothing else in the film, the operation of a normal world to contrast with the engulfing devastation next door. The main actresses’ opportunities increase with age, which is tough on the talented Bella Heathcote, but all three are strong. Among Relic‘s sundry visual effects, Andrew Goldsmith’s patterns of images for the opening and, especially, the closing titles are impressively imaginative.
5 November 2020
[1] Afternote: Having now seen Dick Johnson Is Dead, I can confirm this is much closer to a fair description of Kirsten Johnson’s film.
