Review: Complex horror film 'Censor' dives deep into the 'video nasty'

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In 'Censor,' writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond makes a bold artistic statement inspired by the history of horror, especially 1980s straight-to-VHS.

In her daring feature debut “Censor,” writer-director Prano Bailey-Bond crafts a multilayered and meta piece of filmmaking that uses cheapie exploitation films, or “video nasties” as they were dubbed in the early 1980s in Britain, as a vehicle to explore the ways in which humans process trauma, violence, memory and collective moral panic.

Cowritten with Anthony Fletcher, “Censor” follows Enid , a young woman who works at the censor board in England, screening gory straight-to-video horror flicks and debating with her colleagues how many eye-gougings, maimings and other bodily injuries and intimate debasements are suitable for public consumption.

What troubles Enid most isn’t any of these events but a trauma from far in her past that rears its head at exactly the wrong time. As a child, her sister disappeared and when her parents seek to finally file a death certificate, Enid’s guilt and fears return with a vengeance. Her paranoia and anxiety are informed by her own work, processing the imagery of violence against women day in and day out.

Collaborating with cinematographer Annika Summerson, Bailey-Bond utilizes familiar horror aesthetics, contrasting Enid’s drab and foreboding office atmosphere with more colorful, giallo-inspired choices as the film progresses. Gorgeous, moody lighting bathes the subjects in reds, pinks, cool blues and sickly greens, rendering the mundane horrific and the horrific melodramatic. TV static and shifting aspect ratios serve as transitional tools, trapping us within the square limits of a VHS format.

“Censor” is a bold artistic statement, inspired by the history of its own genre, though it’s not an uncritical assertion, posing complicated questions about media effects without offering easy answers. If there’s a criticism to levy, it’s that at a certain point it ascends to such emotionally and visually operatic heights there’s nowhere else to go; you wonder for a moment if Bailey-Bond has “lost the plot” as it were.

 

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