Relic (2020)

Relic arrives with a premise that could have been assembled in a laboratory for the current cultural moment: a woman director, three generations of women, and dementia as the central subject, treated with empathy and from the sufferer's own disoriented vantage. The film, however, declines to announce its virtues. Natalie Erika James builds dread from ordinary conversation, a creaking wall, a post-it note reading I AM LOVED, and lets the audience do the moral arithmetic unassisted. Robyn Nevin's Edna is not a symbol of anything. She is a woman losing her house, her memories, and eventually her face, and the camera regards her with patience instead of pity.

The casting of Chris Bunton, an actor with Down syndrome, as the neighbor Jamie is the sort of choice a lesser production would have underlined with a speech. Here it passes without comment, which is either admirable restraint or a missed opportunity, depending on the viewer's appetite for commentary. The film's attention to a woman's bodily decay is body horror, not body acceptance. The mould creeping through the walls is not a metaphor for self-love.

Instead of a message, the film offers craft. The corridors loop, the ceilings descend, and we crawl along with Sam into the dark. There is no sermon here, no moment when a character turns to the camera to explain the theme. It is a horror film about watching a parent disappear, and it trusts that this is horror enough. The restraint is almost old-fashioned. In the present climate that reads as either confidence or cowardice, and the film is too well made to settle the question.