Perhaps I’ve mentioned my idea that modern films can experiment with more ethereal themes and plots because the producers know viewers can find answers to their burning questions by going on the web and reading those “The Ending of XXX Explained” articles.
In truth, I’m not sure the theory holds up. There were plenty of vague and surreal movies made pre-internet. Think of Fellini, Bergman, etc.
“Censor” is one inscrutable such film. I decided I wouldn’t look up an explanation for it (at least not before writing this.) choosing instead to marinate in the uncertainty. (That’s kind of my modus operandi for life.)
The movie’s premise is intriguing. In 1980s Britain, Enid works as a film censor for a government film board. Her job is to recommend cuts that need to be made for a film to meet the public, if she doesn’t just deny the release altogether. She has ample material to work with during the era of shockingly violent straight-to-video films that were called video nasties. (“Censor” has a great montage collecting the best bits of such films—an onslaught of blood-drenched decapitations, amputations, and penetrations.)
Like every horror movie heroine, Enid has a troubled past. Her sister disappeared when they were both young, and Enid might have been involved.
A new film arrives for Enid’s review that sets something off in her. Perhaps forgotten memories are stirring. She sets off on a mission of finding an actress in several video nasties who may be her sister.
And then things get really weird.
There’s an interesting contradiction at work here: a horror film that seems to be critiquing the violence and gore of the genre. But is it really? It’s hard to tell. (In this, readers may be reminded of another film I reviewed recently: Alejandro Amenábar’s “Thesis.”)
The question of how movies affect us is interesting. Years ago, I interviewed the director Stuart Gordon and pressed him on this, essentially asking whether we should we hold horror films accountable for their shocking violence? He said:
“I don’t like the films that make violence look fun or easy or cool. If you’re going to show a violent sequence, then you should show all the costs of the violence. You should show all the pain and the suffering, and the blood. It always astonishes me that if you show blood in a film they want you to edit it out. I think you have to be honest about it. I think violence in a film should be shocking and disturbing.”
How would the creators of “Censor” answer the question? I really have no idea; it’s a head-scratcher, but in the best possible way.
I give it an A-.
By the way, the scenes of violence are terrific.
