Female Film Critics 24/375
This is a horror movie explicitly about horror movies, in a way far more introspective and thoughtful than I’ve seen before. Censor is meta, but not like, say, how The Cabin in the Woods is meta. This is a film that examines on multiple levels how we digest horror movies, how they linger with us and, dare we admit it, how they infect us.
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Censor is a cleverly wrapped thriller that wears the classically turned up London Fog overcoat of a period horror film. However, Prano Bailey-Bond’s feature film steeps the tea strongly, setting the action during the Margaret Thatcher years in a workplace rife with sexism, and a lead actor grappling with memory repression and the ticking time bomb of a loss she carries from childhood. And not only guilt for being the surviving child in her family, but perhaps some insidious involvement in her sister’s vanishing.
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At the heart of Censor lies Enid (Niamh Algar), an almost prissy and visibly uptight bureaucrat who works 9-5 deciding what scenes to cut from a seemingly never-ending torrent of extreme film content, set during a period where the so-called Video Nasties moral panic put enormous pressure on censors to be the social barriers between corrupting screen media and Britain’s impressionable youth.
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