Movie Review: Relic

While the new horror film Relic, starring Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote, is ostensibly about a haunted house, there is much more going on within the film’s ninety-minute running time that make the film from Natalie Erika James easily one of the better offerings in the genre in recent memory.

When elderly widow Edna (Robyn Nevin) inexplicably vanishes, her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) head out to Edna’s crumbling country home. There, they find signs of her growing dementia littered throughout the house. Edna returns just as mysteriously as she disappeared and Kay’s concern that her mother seems unwilling – or unable – to say where she’s been clashes with Sam’s unabashed enthusiastic response at simply having her grandmother back. Still, as Edna’s behavior turns increasingly volatile, both Kay and Sam begin to sense that there may be something more insidious at work here than Edna’s deteriorating health and mental state.

First-time writer/director Natalie Erika James does a remarkable job giving the haunted house film a new lease with this outing. Working from a script she co-written with Christian White, James, nor the story, relies on jump scares or startling music cues to get the adrenaline pumping. Instead, the horror unfolds organically, and it is all the more effective for it. While some may find the pace a bit too slow in spots, the pacing is essential in establishing the characters and their motivation. Not too mention the unfolding of the demented architecture at work in the aforementioned haunted house, which manages to function as a window to the psyches of the characters tormented within the house.

Bella Heathcote in “Relic.”

In what is essentially a three-character story, Emily Mortimer embodies Kay as a woman tortured by a past that she has rarely had cause to revisit until now, yet still devoted to the well-being of a mother that possibly never had her best interests in mind during her childhood years.

Bella Heathcote too deserves praise for the way she handles the more physically demanding role of Sam and the psychological toll that takes on her character. Finally, though she’s not expected to carry as much as the other actresses, Robyn Nevin manages to make Edna simultaneously sympathetic and terrifying at various stages throughout.

Relic is easily one of the best films to have come out during the past pandemic-ravaged year. Outstanding performances from the three main actresses and wildly inventive direction from a first-time director that we’re sure to hear more from in the very near future combine to make Relic one of the best horror films to be produced in recent memory.

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Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com

An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

@miketyrkus

Mike Tyrkus

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