Censor

Here’s an idea for a horror film so brilliant in its simplicity that you wonder why nobody’s done it before. If the video nasties of the 1980s had such terrible potential to corrupt, then why didn’t those professional arbiters of what was and wasn’t appropriate for the British public to view become murderous lunatics themselves, given their job was to spend all day, every day reviewing objectionable material?

This conundrum provides the axis around which Prano Bailey-Bond’s riveting debut feature revolves; the Welsh director has adapted it from her own short, Nasty. Niamh Algar plays Enid, the only film classifier who takes her job to heart among a clutch of supine men. Her boss, Fraser, is in sycophantic thrall to Michael Smiley’s typically menacing film producer Doug, while her colleague Sanderson takes a laissez-faire approach out of laziness, a desire to be seen as subversive, or both.

Eventually, the steady stream of cheaply-shot exploitation flicks, awash with brutal violence that disproportionately targets women, both aggravates past traumas for Enid and unmoors her from reality. The film follows suit; perhaps Bailey-Bond’s greatest achievement here is how gradually, how coolly, she controls Enid’s psychological unspooling and still cleaves to a taut 84-minute running time. 

Bailey-Bond’s influences are palpable, both classic and contemporary. A scholarly understanding of under-the-counter '80s fare is self-evident, and there are also nods to more recent material – everything from Ringu to the more avowedly horrific entries in Ben Wheatley’s catalogue (some might feel that one particular musical cue nods too explicitly to one of his most unsettling moments).

More important, though, is how powerfully Censor announces another young British woman as a scintillating new voice in horror, after Rose Glass gave us Saint Maud last year. Bailey-Bond converts her intellectual mastery of the genre into a viscerally thrilling nightmare.