The setup of Prano Bailey-Bond’s feature-length directorial debut, Censor, is a ripe one, grappling with a trade that’s generally seen as meddling at best and destructive at worst. Enid (Niamh Algar) is a film censor during a time when the job was at its most contentious: the video nasty era of 1980s Britain. With a serious level of commitment, the young woman screens an endless amount of gore- and sex-filled productions in order to decide what gets passed, what gets cut to get passed, and what gets banned outright.
While her colleagues generally take a more flippant attitude toward this work, which they conduct in a drab little government office, Enid approaches it as a calling, and she remains unfazed by whatever depraved image of bodily harm or sexual violence that she watches. As she states to her parents over dinner one evening, after they humorously ask her if she’s seen anything good lately, “It’s not entertainment, mum. I do it to protect people.”
During a time when low-budget horror abundant in gore and degradation was causing ripples of mass hysteria throughout the U.K., the censor was thrust into the media spotlight in a way that’s never quite been seen since. So as the tightly wound Enid is constantly inundated with news clips and soundbites speculating about the effect of violent entertainment on the public’s psyche, it’s hard not to be initially swept up in her crusade. But as any avid fan of Scream knows, “Movies don’t create psychos. Movies make psychos more creative.”
Nevertheless, a killing does occur and it rocks Enid to the core. A seemingly normal man in a nearby neighborhood has committed a ghastly murder, recalling a horror movie that Enid passed—with some cuts, of course—several months prior. At the same time, her latest assignment, a backwoods horror movie called Don’t Go in the Church, brings back memories of the sister who disappeared without a trace when they were children, a moment that Enid could never fully recall. Realizing that the real censoring going on is within her own hazy mind, she becomes convinced that the woman in the film is, in fact, her now-grown sister.
At this point, reality and fiction start to merge, as Enid searches for Don’t Go in the Church’s enigmatic director, Frederick North (Adrian Schiller), hoping that he can reunite her with her sister. Hitting a dead end within her own office, she heads to the local video store, cryptically pressing the clerk to see the banned collection of North’s tapes. The scene, which sees Enid trying to prove her bona fides by speaking in the lingo of someone well-versed in underground horror, perfectly captures that bizarre moment in time when the video nasty had to be passed discreetly under the counter like contraband, for fear of police raids and hefty fines.
It’s unfortunate, then, that Censor pulls back from its social interrogation just when it’s working up a head of steam. Enid soon goes off the deep end, and as the film is taken up with her frenzied search for her sister, its historical context starts fading from view. Algar has a committed stuffiness that belies Enid’s simmering ferocity, but the character is barely sketched outside of her job and trauma, making her eventual emotional catharsis feel hollow. “Someone’s lost the plot,” a co-worker snidely comments upon observing Enid’s frazzled behavior, a sentiment that could easily apply to the film’s subsequent lack of focus.
Censor’s third act is certainly explosive, most clearly recalling Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio and David Amito and Michael Laicini’s Antrum in the structural unhinging of its own cinematic techniques. But while those films culminated in a thrilling state of disorienting ambiguity, Censor takes a much more literal-minded approach to its final insanity, arriving at a conclusion that seemed obvious from the start. Bailey-Bond creates some legitimately frightening images in this final stretch, alongside an atmosphere of dread that threatens to overwhelm the senses, but it ultimately feels like a stylistic stunt, lacking the transgressive conviction of the very video nasties that serve as the film’s source of inspiration.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
