Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Prano Bailey-Bond
Starring: Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta, Adrian
Schiller, Michael Smiley
How lucky are we to live at a time when the censorship of movies is pretty
much a thing of the past (well, in the western world at least)? Back in
the '80s, the UK and Ireland were as censorious as any Middle Eastern
nation, with anything containing the merest drop of blood (or the use of
nunchuks) banned in the former and anything with an exposed nipple or hint
of blasphemy denied in the latter. I recall the thrill of arriving into
film school one morning to find my lecturer had sourced a dodgy pirate VHS
of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, banned at the time in Ireland. Now you can rent the movie on VOD at the
click of a button.
The heyday of film censorship in the British Isles was the mid 1980s, when
the tabloids decided that horror movies were the cause of all of society's
ills. Politicians quickly joined the crusade against the "video nasties",
spouting nonsensical ideas about the negative effects of horror movies on
the average Brit's brain. Tory twat Graham Bright even claimed that video
nasties "affect dogs as well." Any time a violent crime was committed,
tabloid hacks would attempt to link it to a specific movie, though no
evidence was ever found that any violent crimes of the period were spurred
by watching a movie. Despite this, a lot of video stores had their
businesses ruined, and some even served jail time for daring to rent out a
copy of Night of the Bloody Apes.
With her feature debut Censor, Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond takes us back to the height of
the Video Nasties furore. For her protagonist she's chosen that mortal
enemy of the horror movie fan – a film censor. Enid (Niamh Algar)
is a censor for the British Board of Film Classification. Her job is to
watch movies and decide whether they require cuts or sometimes outright
banning. Enid believes she's "protecting" the British people from what she
considers harmful content, and at one point she even spouts something
close to that age old rallying cry of the fascist, "Think of the
children."
While viewing a low-budget British horror movie called 'Don't Go in the
Church' ("We soon won’t be able to go anywhere," Enid jokes with a
colleague), Enid becomes unsettled. A scene in the movie in which a young
girl is murdered by a Luigi Montefiori lookalike skews suspiciously close
to the event that led to the disappearance of Enid's younger sister Nina
as a child. Enid looks into the work of the film's director, Frederick
North (Adrian Schiller), and finds that he regularly works with an
actress called Alice Lee (Sophia La Port). Convinced that Alice is
actually Nina, Enid decides to track down North. Meanwhile she's
contending with the guilt of having passed a movie that the tabloids are
claiming inspired a man to murder his family.
Much like Paul Schrader's Hardcore, which similarly sees a conservative anti-hero descend into a world that
sickens them, Censor is essentially a reworking of John
Ford's The Searchers. Enid is the film's Ethan Edwards, convinced that her sister needs
saving from what she has decided is the greatest threat to her society.
Enid hates horror movies, and the men who make them (in reality women
filmmakers like Roberta Findlay and Nettie Pena also fell foul of the UK
censor), as much as Edwards hates the Comanche. She shares a lineage with
the protagonists of David Mamet's Homicide and Kubrick's
Eyes Wide Shut in seeing evil where it doesn't really exist.
Perhaps Enid has to believe that the people who make horror movies are
evil because if not, then she's ruined lives for nothing with her actions.
As Enid continues her descent, the lines between reality and fiction begin
to blur. The censor's main argument for banning movies was the suggestion
that the public couldn't distinguish pantomime from reality, but
ironically Enid seems to be the one who can't make such a distinction. In
the film's bloody climax, the edges of the widescreen aspect ratio begin
to subliminally close in like the walls of the Death Star's trash
compactor, as though Enid is morphing into the heroine of her own horror
movie. By the end we're unsure ourselves if what we're watching is real or
not. Is this happening? Is it occurring only in Enid's mind? Is it a scene
from the latest Frederick North movie?
Irish actress Algar is outstanding in the lead role. Believe me when I say
it takes a lot for me to empathise with a film censor, but while I never
agreed with Enid's views I always felt sorry and a little scared of what
might happen to her, or what she might do to others. Enid spends much of
the movie staring at screens through a clunky pair of spectacles, and
Algar's eyes are asked to do a lot of the movie's emotional heavy lifting,
betraying her psychological state as she outwardly pretends her damaging
job is merely water off a duck's back.
Bailey-Bond and her crew use their relatively tight budget cleverly to
suggest the mood of the 1980s rather than ram the decade down our throat
like many recent movies. The director doesn't ape the look of '80s movies
– visually Censor has more in common with recent horrors
like
It Follows
and
The Neon Demon
– but rather recreates the time with ugly fashions, horrific domestic
décor and a wonderfully convincing recreation of the carriage of a period
tube train.
It's in the workings of the BBFC that the film seems anachronistic.
Censor gives the BBFC far more credit than the institution
likely deserves. One of Enid's coworkers constantly argues the case for
horror movies in a liberal manner that I doubt would have been put forth
at the time. I also find it hard to swallow that Black people were hired
as censors by the BBFC in this era (as portrayed here), as everything I've
read about the organisation of the period suggests it was a clique of
middle class white men.
Similarly, the film ignores the classism and xenophobia that were
motivating factors behind the Video Nasties furore. The censors would
regularly give a pass to arthouse fare as it was seen as the domain of the
middle class, who they condescendingly believed could distinguish reality
from fiction in a way the working class couldn't. The character of
Frederick North seems incongruous as it was overwhelmingly American and
Latin filmmakers who fell foul of the censors, who had no issues with the
gory product of Britain's Hammer and Amicus, which would play on BBC on
Saturday nights during this period. As a British horror movie with
lashings of gore and arthouse stylings, Censor would likely
have caused much confusion for the BBFC of the 1980s.
Censor is on MUBI UK now.
