Censor

 Film censor Enid Baines is going through a "rough patch" as they say in the U.K.  Enid suspects that she murdered her own sister, Nina, years earlier during a amnesiac episode.  In the alternative, Enid thinks her sister may be alive but about to be butchered in a "video nasty" snuff film.  And to add to her travails, she passed a film called Deranged for audiences 15 and up; the movie features a scene in which someone cuts off a person's face and eats it -- exactly what some madman had done in real life, a crime for which the poor censor, Enid, is now being blamed to the extent that she is dogged by hostile media and tormented by hateful and threatening phone calls.  Enid is on the brink of running amok, and, just before, she takes an axe and starts hacking people to pieces, one of her co-workers snippily remarks "Someone here has lost the plot."  Censor (2021), the film that chronicles Enid's accumulating misfortunes, is a production financed primarily by the British Film Institute (BFI) and, so, it has some pretensions toward significance and artistry.  But, in fact, the film is a glum low-budget horror film, reasonably effective, but not much better than the stuff that the picture satirizes.  Set in 1985, the movie is a period piece:  Mrs. Thatcher, among other politicians, is calling for a crackdown on sex-and-gore films made on the cheap and, apparently, so popular that certain pundits are blaming them for rampant crime and social disintegration.  The film's sets are almost entirely underground, long dark tunnels, subway platforms, and ill-lit dingy offices that might as well be subterranean as well.  Until the last three or four shots, everything takes place in darkness -- streets are empty, probably to avoid the expense of gathering period automobiles for the movie.  As with pornography, people's houses serve as sets -- and the same low-buck strategies used to shoot "video nasties" are, also, employed in Censor creating a self-reflexive meta-textural narrative, mirrors reflecting mirrors in a mise en abyme:  the heroine's job is censoring "video nasties" and the film in which we see her, ultimately, morphs into just such a picture -- indeed, the last shot in the movie is a VHS tape being ejected from a grungy-looking video-player:  the name of the film marked on the VHS spine is Censor.

Censor is essentially a low-budget horror film about a woman who's job is to censor and require cuts in low-budget horror films.  Although there is some incidental social commentary about British politics and the right-wing cult of "law and order", the gist of the movie is murder, rape, and mutilation.  The film teases us with graphic shots of mayhem (in the title sequence someone gets gruesomely murdered with a power drill) before embracing that same kind of mayhem at the film's climax.  The picture is too gloomy and claustrophobic to be much fun, but it's reasonably scary.  The social commentary is bogus and hypocritical.  At a mere 82 minutes, Censor doesn't wear out its welcome but in the end, there's less here than meets the eye.   

We first meet Enid making notes on some anonymous gore-fest, remarking that the eye-gouging scene is too realistic.  It seems that the censors don't object to brutality so long as its ineptly and unrealistically staged.  (The face-eating episode in Deranged was passed because the special effects were so poor that the scene was risible.)  All the best stuff in Censor occurs in the first twenty minutes.  When Enid wants to snip some of the eye-gouging, her blase colleague says that it's "part of a grand tradition, you know Oedipus Rex, Polyphemus in the Odyssey, of course, King Lear and even -- dare I say -- Un Chien Andalou."  The string of allusions flatters the audience and gives a sophisticated tone to the proceedings, of course, before everything devolves into axe murders.  Enid, quite reasonably, replies that "You lost the argument when you brought Shakespeare into the room."  That night, Enid learns that her parents intend to implement a death certificate on Enid's little sister, Nina, who vanished many years earlier when she was under our heroine's supervision.  There are some dark intimations that Enid has suffered a mental breakdown earlier, possibly triggered by painful memories of her sister's disappearance.  Enid begins to flash-back to the day of Nina's vanishing.  (In these sequences, the movie borrows very liberally from David Lynch's Twin Peaks:  Fire Walk with Me -- there is the same dark and morbid-looking woods, the same shack in the shadows, and, even, the same horrible-looking tramp implicated in the murder.)  Enid learns that her sister, if she wasn't murdered by our heroine herself, may still be alive but, possibly, slated for slaughter in a "Snuff" film directed by someone named Frederick North.  Enid does some sleuthing and tracks down the location where North is planning to shoot a murder scene.  The tiny crew for the horror film that North is making somehow seems to expect Enid's appearance.  In fact, Enid is made-up to appear in the movie -- she's smeared with blood, dressed in white, and handed an axe.  This, of course, turns out to be a serious mistake.  

Censor ends with some satirical passages in bright sunlight.  Nina learns that "video nasties" have been completely banned and that crime in the UK has diminished to "zero".  A rainbow appears over England's green and pleasant land. Censorship has delivered on its promise and everyone in Great Britain is now happy, fulfilled and safe.  These shots are also redolent of David Lynch as well (the firemen on their truck with Dalmatians in Blue Velvet for  instance) and the American's influence hangs heavy over this film -- as in Lynch movies, there are repeated shots of characters moving from gloom into complete annihilating darkness.  The film was directed by a young woman named Prano Bailey-Bond,  She does good work with very limited material.  The parts of the film that are most interesting involve the censors, their interactions, and the rationales they provide for their work. (In an interview, Bailey-Bond remarks that "video nasties" came with a prologue in which a bureaucrat sternly intoned that it was a felony crime for someone under the age of 12 (or 15 or 18) to watch the movie -- reasonably enough, she says that the scariest thing about the video was this preface.)  Since the censorship of the video nasties is soon supplanted by various murders and horror sequences, the best thing about the movie is quickly enough submerged in a predictable slasher narrative.  This is unfortunate because the closely researched parts of the movie relating to censorship are the most interesting things in the film.