Review: ‘Relic’ Underscores the Horror of Losing Someone to Age
Relic knows that some of the best horror hits closest to home. The family unit, with all its complicated dynamics, is a breading ground for deep, internalized anxieties. You’re familiar with it. Years of daily interactions, holiday visits, birthday cards, celebratory dinners, and so on amount to intricate relationships found only with time. Some rich and rewarding. Others exhausting and painful. But for writer director Natalie Erika James, the most terrifying thing is losing that rewarding relationship through the painful process of degenerative illness.
Throwing you head long into the plot, Relic begins with Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) traveling to the home of their missing mother/grandmother Edna (Robyn Nevin). For days she’s been missing, gone without a trace and nowhere to be found. Hoping the local authorities may find her, they wait, spending days rummaging through disheveled living spaces and unearthing ornaments of their familial past. Strange creaks and moans resonate from within the walls of the antique home, and just when they’re about to give up, out of the blue, Edna returns. But something’s off about her.
She doesn’t know where she’s been. Her emotions are sporadic and often aggressive. And she insists that someone else has been entering the house. Chalking it up as mental instability associated with age, Kay starts looking for a suitable retirement home while Sam floats the idea of moving in to take care of her. What ensues, like every horror film, veers into the supernatural with Edna slowing becoming someone they can’t even recognize.
Losing someone to age is the true horror of Relic, and like Hereditary and The Babadook, the film draws from the vein of familial horror to conjure up its scares. The death of a mother or father already carries a mighty grief, but the months and years leading up to their inevitable passing can prove a different trauma entirely. The loss of self — through memory, physical ability, or resemblance to your former youth — brings about the reality that the maternal/paternal figure you once knew growing up will never be the same, and as Edna exhibits symptoms of Alzheimer’s and dementia, James underscores just how taxing and horrific it can be for everyone within the family dynamic. It is a form of progressive rot, one that manifests itself both psychologically and physically within the film. Edna talks to someone invisible to both Kay and Sam, and her home suddenly has newfound passages behind boxes of clutter. She acts out with anger and violence towards people she loved within the confines of a space that has grown lonely in the wake of losing her husband and the departure of her children. Her paper-like skin starts to bruise and decay, evoking a bodily horror for a disease of the mind, while the walls and ceiling of her home adorn water-stains and mold, making the place a withered structure of better days. It collectively paints a painful portrait of decline at the end of life.
How the film relates these elements comes from a distance. As mentioned, the plot is well underway by the time the film begins. Little time is allotted to getting you up and running and instead a reverse pyramid structure is used — start from a singular point of little context that eventually widens as the film progresses. Though the film is only 89 minutes in length, it does take a while for Relic to reach those depths. By the time the setup begins to pay off, I feel as if some of the emotional beats have been nullified, either by way of minimal characterization or traditional haunted house story devices deployed earlier in the film. In my mind, this is the film’s true undoing, but when the film is addressing matters so proximate, so inevitable for every family, the sense of loss can feel particularly relevant.
—
