Like recent events, the 2021 edition of the Sundance Film Festival has shifted from a personalized viewing window to a virtual version. Despite the change, we will continue to provide reviews and insights on the most interesting experiences we find, from indie films to VR experiments.
Censorship is the object of artists, but it is also a resentful compliment – because to be a dedicated censor, you must believe that art has power. Faith is the dark heart of Censorship, a horror film about the most notorious moral panic of the horror film.
Censorship, presented at the Sundance Film Festival this week is the debut of Welsh director Prano Bailey-Bond. It takes place in the 1980s in Britain during the height of the ‘video nasties’ controversy, in which dozens of films were seen – some of now iconic names such as Dario Argento and David Cronenberg, others of directors who were quickly forgotten – banned or otherwise condemned for their cruel violence and sex.
Enid (Niamh Algar) is an exhibitor at the Film Rating Board of Britain, a small team that stands between sincere citizens and mental corruption. She treats her work with tired resignation, apparently unmoved by constant simulated blood pressure and the occasional producer. Then a film she approved inspires, presumably, a murder, which ignites a firestorm in the press. An enigmatic slasher film brings back memories of her lost sister, whose disappearance has haunted Enid and her parents for years. Her life begins to unravel.
Censorship acknowledge the almost inherent funnyness of film content reviews – the process of dry pores over trivial exploitation and the recommendation of arbitrary cuts in disintegration and excrement, to find out exactly how much face-eating is aesthetically defensible in a work of art. While the real “video nasties” list jewels like Argentos Suspiria and Cronenberg’s Scanners, censorship is more concerned about its avalanche of clumsy, budget-free projects that have traded on pure shock. Its centerpiece is a fictional, almost plotless work entitled Do not go to church, a nod to the horror filmmakers’ favorite assignment to the public.
But Censorship is much more awful than camp-like. Although its end does not yield an incredibly effective setup, Algar catches the hollow-eyed, growing upset of Enid as she tries to solve a riddle in which no one else believes. Paparazzi and anonymous phone calls shoot her sanity away. Ordinary spaces become subtly threatening, such as Enid’s abandoned apartment and the dull, almost palpably outdated classification office.
While the video nasties are long gone, it’s easier to sympathize with the censorship, a figure who has long been mocked as a heartless audacity or comic scolding. The film explores a more frightening idea: cinematic sinners like Enid see a vague boundary between reality and fiction, and under the wrong circumstances they can lose the lines completely. The longer Censorship running, the harder it becomes to distinguish between the real story and the fictional films in the film.
That these movies kind of look like bad just make Censorship more effective. Many horrors examine the premise that films drive people crazy, such as that of John Carpenter Cigarette fire or the 2018 mockumentary Antrum. There’s nothing special about the video nasties here – but the audience just gives it the same power.
After all, the film board’s enemy is not the director behind a sniper. It’s the child who rewinds and re-plays a fleeting moment of suspense, or the criminal inspired by mere assumptions about what appears in a movie, or the tabloid newspaper that turns these assumptions into a scandal. Want in Censorship, art only gives people permission to leave reality behind. It can not control where they end up.