The final image of the three generations of women who share the center of “Relic,” Natalie Erika James’s arresting horror debut, isn’t particularly scary. But it’s easily one of the most unsettling, ambiguous and unusual movie tableaus I’ve seen in some time.
Notified that her octogenarian mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin), is missing, Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote), drive to Edna’s large rural home. There, they find disturbing clues of a deteriorating mind, including Post-it notes with reminders to “take pills” and, more ominously, “don’t follow it.” When Edna reappears, refusing to say where she has been, there’s filth under her fingernails and a dark bruise blooming on her breastbone.
“I’m losing everything,” she tells Kay, who’s becoming increasingly troubled by terrifying nightmares and the home’s creeping black mold. Sam wants to stay and help her grandmother, but Kay, guilty over her recent neglect of the older woman, wants to find a senior care facility. These exchanges, performed with remarkable subtlety, deepen the characters’ relationships and smoothly communicate familial tensions with minimum back story.
In its place are a surpassingly creepy atmosphere and a patiently ratcheting unease as “Relic” deftly merges the familiar bumps and groans of the haunted-house movie with a potent allegory for the devastation of dementia. Crawling through shadowy corridors and dusty rooms, Charlie Sarroff’s burrowing camera reveals spaces shifting and reconfiguring, as if the home were mimicking the slip of Edna’s mind. Doors seal shut and ceilings lower as this strange and melancholic picture approaches its chilling finale; yet no supernatural sighting can compete with the unnerving moment when Kay looks at her mother and sees only a stranger looking back.
Relic
Rated R for inappropriate language and a bed that no one should have looked under. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
