From Her to Me to You: Dementia-Horror "Relic" is MY Movie of 2020

I did as I have announced in October and have watched almost all the movies I planned to watch during the ongoing lockdown. I did my little festival-at-home-thing (though there's still movies whose release dates have been postponed and are therefore not available yet, so I couldn't watch them) and I have come to a conclusion! The winner of the fall film festival at home and my best film of the year 2020 is the Australian dementia-horror "Relic" which was written and directed by Natalie Erika James! 👏👏👏👏👏

If you ever wonder; number two is Brandon Cronenberg's stylishly cruel "Possessor" and third place goes to the super gory and revolting cosmic horror flick "The Beach House" which was written and directed by Jeffrey A. Brown.

 

So let's talk about Relic! Before getting into details, I think it is worth stressing that in this movie, atmosphere is everything and if you're not someone who enjoys slow, atmospheric horror, you probably won't like Relic very much. But only probably. There are in fact lots of suspenseful scenes that will push you to the edge of your seat, but in order to completely rejoice in the full, wonderfully devastating aroma of this film, it is worth letting yourself getting carried away by the slower scenes that build up the tension.

Another thing I want to stress is that I am discussing things that can be considered spoilers, so it is probably better you watch it first and then read -I'm not giving away too much, don't worry.

There aren't many filmmakers who can play with the relation between context and picture masterfully, so that showing a single image just at the right moment charges it with symbolic meanings so powerful to instantaneously awake extreme emotions in the audience and becomes a strong way of storytelling. Director Natalie Erika James does not only master this art, she is apparently the queen of it!

She starts showing what she can fairly early into the movie: Lead character Kay (played by Emily Mortimer) needs to check on her mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) who lives in a remote house in the Australian outback because her neighbors haven't seen her around for a couple of weeks. Kay and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) travel to the outback and enter the house through some sort of cat door (another symbol, but I'll get to that later) and one of the first closeups is a bowl filled with rotten bananas standing on Edna's kitchen counter. Now, the motive of rotting is a very important element that holds a tremendous metaphoric significance in Relic, but here there is another, completely different layer of terror that is being unleashed by the mere sight of a few old bananas - "Nobody has touched the food for a few days, she might be dead. What if my mother too dies alone at home and I needed to find her dead body?". A very small detail, a pleasant nature-morte will invoke dread and alarm in the targeted audience when shown under the right circumstances. Relic's target audience is Kay and her likes in this case - neither very young nor middle aged people living and working in big cities, trying to ignore or procrastinate the moment they have to decide if their parent is fit to live alone and where they should live if not. Now suppose you are Kay and the first thing you see after entering the house of your mother who has been missing is an indication that she might have died alone; all that anxiety, all the worries, the fear of losing a parent in a mere bowl of bananas. As I mentioned above, mold and rottenness play a great metaphoric role in Relic and the overripe bananas are just a foretaste to that. Wonderful imagery that speaks volumes.

 

Following this powerful entrance both into the house as well as into the film, Kay and Sam temporarily settle down in Edna's place and explore the house and the traces of Edna's very lonely life. As Edna suddenly reappears one morning she insists on acting as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened and she never has been missing. On her return she acts very frozen (though how much of that is her own character is hard to tell), absent mindedly and incoherently. The two younger women keep staying with her until a decision is taken concerning her living situation, as the matriarch is clearly losing her mental power. Or is she not?  Edna is convinced that there is someone else in the house who moves her stuff around and that the house is not the same as before. Something has changed. But is it Edna or the house?

I have mentioned before how much I enjoy haunted house stories; classics as much as unconventional ones and I just love the role of the house in Relic. Though it is not directly about a haunted house, in Relic the building plays a very special role: all its disruptions, defects and faults; its growing patches of mold, rot and black spots reflect the spreading of Edna's illness in a very bitter and visceral way. So, in a sense, Edna IS the house. Edna mentions that her problems started, or in her own words "someone came into the house" when her husband died and she survived him to be left alone. It is safe to say then, that her illness, though not initiated by it - because dementia runs in the family and would have come to her naturally-, is at least enhanced by the challenges of living alone.

Which leads us to one of the major themes of Relic: distance. There is a remarkable emotional as well as physical distance all around and in every direction in this movie. Even though the three women, as grandmother, mother, daughter and granddaughter, are related to each other in the closest possible sense, they couldn't be much further from each other if they wanted to. Take for once the distance between Kay and Edna. I find it striking that as her daughter, Kay doesn't even have the keys to Edna's house; an eighty plus woman who "forgets things" and Sam needs to climb into her house through some kind of dog door, as I mentioned above. In her conversation with the police, Kay falls into a defensive mode when stating that she hasn't spoken to her mother in weeks and thus hints at the guilt she feels for not caring for her enough. She also mentions that Edna thought someone else was in her house and yet that's not reason enough for Kay to worry about. Now, I don't want to judge Kay, I believe from Edna's behavior that there is a reason she acts the way she does. In fact, I find her extremely relatable. But I want to draw attention to the conflicting emotions, neglect vs. guilt, dismissal vs. apprehension, because they will play a gigantic role in the accumulation of a tension that will be released in the finale in an unprecedented way.

Kay is the key figure in this story not only because she is equally distant to her mother as to her daughter, "the bridge generation" so to say, but also because she leads the life and embodies the deepest fears of probably the majority of the spectators. Her affection for her mother is overstretched by Edna's illness and she chooses to ignore and fails to empathize with how lonely Edna in reality is.

Thinking that distance is confined to her relationship with her mother would be sheer wrong, as the connection to her daughter Sam leaves much to be desired too. Only now that they have come to look for Edna is it that Kay finds out her daughter has lost her job at an art gallery and makes her living by working at a bar.

Let's briefly turn our eyes to Edna, who is slowly but progressively losing her memory and her cognitive skills. She disappears into the bush for weeks at a stretch, she has sticky notes all around the house to remind herself of things she forgets, she suffers extreme mood swings evoking dangerous situations both for herself as well as others, she's talking to herself, sees people who aren't there and suffers extreme paranoid fits. Her illness is the main reason for her loneliness, because she really isn't herself anymore.

The only attempt at establishing a closeness, a true relationship comes from Sam towards Edna, as she is trying to protect her from her mother's hurtful comments, she wears her cardigan and tries to build something akin to a team with her grandma. Sooner than later though she realizes the impossibility of such an endeavor due to Edna's illness. What Sam doesn't realize is that Kay is treating her mother with the same kind of contempt-like feeling that she herself shows to her own mother. And talks about a distant ancestor who also got dementia but wasn't taken proper care of show that apart from the physical illness, it is also the attitude towards this illness that has been running in the family. It is this circle that forms the so-called "Relic" which has been passed on in this family from one generation to another.

The whole family story, the connection between the characters and their ancestral past, we find out implicitly, through little gestures and remarks, drop by drop - another storytelling device visualized with the bathtub that overflows first in the beginning and then in the end of the movie. On this note I'd like to also praise the camera works that often work in a circular way as to emphasize the circularity of the history and that provide gorgeous, gorgeous pictures.

 

All this mess of a situation leads to a confrontation with the symbolic ill and culminates in one of horror fiction's most powerful, chilling and devastating final scenes. Everything Kay tries to undermine in her apparent selfishness and everything Sam tries to embrace in her naiveté will come back to them as a heavy slap in the face (in one of the creepiest chase scenes ever) they will have to deal with, and boy! Deal with it they do. This is the part of the movie I will not spoil for you if you haven't seen it, because it needs to be internalized with its full impact and load of emotions. Suffice to say in all my years watching horror movies I have never seen and felt anything like it.

Old age is a difficult subject to cover in a horror movie. It combines a wide range of fears about our own bodies and minds decaying and falling apart before disappearing, which needs to be, and unfortunately is not, treated with care and delicacy. As someone who has had an extremely close relationship and affection to my own grandmother, whom I truly adored, I feel a greater acceptance and sense of normalcy towards "old" bodies and it is with concern that I watch a trend in modern horror movies where those bodies are used as elements of monstrosities, of fear - something we should be scared and disgusted of. I am very happy to see that Natalie Erica James does not blunder into that trap and treats this difficult subject with as much respect and dignity as it deserves.