Written and Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond
Starring Niamh Algar, Michael Smiley, Sophia La Porta, and Nicholas Burns
Running time 1 hour and 24 minutes
In theaters June 11 and on demand June 18

by Rosalie Kicks, Old Sport & Editor in Chief

“I do it to protect people.”

Do movies have the power to affect us in such a way that they alter our psyche? 

Personally speaking, I feel my decisions have been influenced by flicks my entire life. My fashion choices (i.e. Charlie Chaplin phase), speech (I talk movie, i.e. NO) and home decor (i.e. I have a laboratory à la Dr. Carruthers’s lab in Devil Bat) have all been dictated by cinema. However, I have not been convinced to murderrrr after watching a film… at least not yet.

“Eye gouging must go...”

In Prano Bailey-Bond’s feature debut Censor, much like the main character Enid (Niamh Algar) I was left questioning fact versus fiction. Enid is a film censor that watches horror films to determine what is acceptable for audience consumption. She takes her job seriously, performs her work meticulously, and believes that it is her duty to protect the viewer. The film is set sometime in the 1980s in the United Kingdom when the “video nasty” was all the rage. The video nasties genre is defined as low-budget horror films that were distributed on videocassette and known for their violent and salacious content. 

It is learned through the course of the film that Enid’s sister disappeared at a young age and that Enid was the last known person with her. Despite her attempts to make sense of the past, Enid is unable to recall the events of that day which has brought a suffocating guilt that is only exacerbated after a recent murder is linked to a film that she assigned the rating to. Much like the murderer in the movie, the perpetrator claims he is unable to recall the violent act he committed. The media coins him the amnesiac killer and links Enid to the release of the flick. 

This event, along with Enid’s parents deciding to close out the missing person search and have her sister legally deemed dead,cause her to spiral. When she views an archival film, Don’t Go In The Church, Enid believes there are similarities to her past and thinks it may hold the key to finding her sister. The lines between reality and imagination start to blur, sending Enid on a pursuit for the truth. Her journey starts at a local video store in which she demands the clerk to show her the “under the counter” banned films he has available. This later leads her to the film’s producer (a slimy sleaze merchant), as she believes the star of the horror flick, Alice Lee may be her missing sister who was kidnapped by the director.

I loved the look and feel of this film. The cinematography by Annika Summerson along with the score provide an atmospheric viewing that kept me engrossed with the picture. With a swift eighty-four minute runtime this movie manages to pack a lot of punch, delving into such areas as human trauma and societal fixations. Censor asks one to think how they are influenced by what they watch. Is it the filmmaker that creates the horror or is that darkness in a person already? As I stated earlier on, sure I mimic the films that I watch but, my actions are of my own will and not controlled by something I saw on the silver screen. 

Niamh Algar plays the character of Enid superbly, a woman that is battling grief and remorse, all the while trying to make sense of her memories that undoubtedly have been self-edited. At one point a fellow coworker says to Enid, “You’d be surprised what the brain will edit out when it can’t handle the truth,” which I felt reminds her that there may be reasons for the past to have gone missing. 

Prano’s attention to detail is one of a serious film aficionado. This is especially noticed during the final sequence of the film in which the aspect ratio slowly transforms into video format as Enid’s perception of the world around her becomes a horror narrative. Enid’s hunt for the truth ends with more questions than answers, which also left me thinking that some things are best left to our imagination. The things we don’t see are the most frightful.