Analogy films are never my favorites. An analogy is an obviously useful tool for storytellers to add some depth to the subject they are trying to explore, but often times an analogy can lose the story entirely. A movie I struggle with is Darren Aronofsky's mother!, which is virtually plotless outside of the analogy he is trying to express. The problem here is that an analogy works in conjunction with a story, as an echo of meaning to the drama and characters being thrown through their narrative tunnel. When you lose the story, the characters, and the drama, what you have left is a pretentious lecture, an artist wanting to scream at you rather than propose a mutual problem to solve or consider. It is the very nature of pretension, where the artist claims he knows better than you and that you aren't clever enough to pick up on what he is trying to say, so he better just spell it out. There are versions of the analogy film that work, such as Eraserhead, but the film consciously works on emotional reaction, not on lectured bullet points like mother! does with its obvious references to the bible and global catastrophe. mother! lectures, Eraserhead feels.
Relic, a movie that has garnered a polarized reaction from the general populace (but rave reviews from critics), suffers from a viewership who have been burned before. Everyone has seen at least a half dozen of these empty, pretentious lectures in the guise of a movie, and everyone has learned telltale signs that they are being subjected to one: slow burn plots, a large percentage of lingering, quiet moments, metaphors that are deciphered within the first act, minimalism in all things - framing, dialogue, plot. You know the type, and it can be an easy thing to call it early when watching a movie that starts to run down the list checking boxes. But Relic has an intelligence to it, a confidence that says what it wants to say early to leave room for the experience that follows. Relic isn't trying to lecture you, it is trying to convey.
Part of me wants to call Relic subtle, but to do so I need to specify a rather large caveat. Relic is about a mother and daughter who go out to the grandmother's house after they get a call she has been missing for an unknown frame of time, roughly estimated to be a week. They get to the house and it becomes quickly apparent grandma may not all be there. Post-it notes are strewn about the house as little reminders for things you'd expect someone to recall without effort, like "remember to turn off the water" stuck next to the tub. Grandma shows up sometime in the first 30 min of the film, and no one can get out of her where exactly she has been. From this brief description, you can probably tell relatively what this story is about, but for those of you sensitive to it, consider this your spoiler warning.
Relic wastes no time telling you it is a movie about dementia, and that is my big caveat. The theme of the movie is not subtle, not in the least, but it isn't supposed to be. Director Natalie Erika James knows that the best experience she can give you is not through obfuscating the point. Dementia is the theme, but it is how dementia is depicted and felt that makes the film work. In part, this is done through the use of conflict. The grandmother will whisper to something (relatively) unseen. Occasionally in the background of shots you will see what looks like an emaciated human figure, just out of focus, and you draw the conclusion this is what she is talking to. The grandmother's fear is a presence in the house, something she feels to be stalking her, and making her home a confusing maze for her to maneuver through. The film keeps this side of the horror at arms length for a majority of its runtime, preferring to work through the conflict of the mother and daughter who came to visit.
The mother and daughter's fear is that gran is so unpredictable. They are initially empathetic, splitting their empathy between them as the mother wants a pragmatic solution while the daughter wants to fill in whatever void she feels in her grandmother. It is a clever design, where one person fears the dementia taking them over and the others fear the what dementia has turned her into. The conflict resonates as real even as the events begin to slip into surrealist horror. What this sort of conflict does, however, is slow the pacing of the movie, and that will definitely be to taste. I like a good slow burn film - after all, Rosemary's Baby, one of my favorite films of all time, has very little horror throughout. It is the mounting presence of horror that makes the film work. There is a similar, but far thinner, paradigm here. The trick with a slow burn is a payoff in the end, whether that be something big or something meaningful, you need that investment to return to you. For me, by the halfway point of the film I had reserved myself to not really getting my investment back, to enjoying what the film was trying to do more than what it had done, but the film surprised me. I won't spoil the ending, but it turned into something sincerely anxiety inducing, taking its premise into more existential waters while also showing grieving relatives of the poor gran come to violent terms with what is going on. No more brushing this under the rug. A mental issue in a family effects everyone, and the film does a wonderful job depicting this.
Relic's success is in its choice subject and in how it decides to play this story. It follows traditions set up by other films of a similar nature, but manages to be effective through skillful direction. There are moments here and there of overstepped punctuation - a post-it note reading "Get Out" or "I am loved" that seems to abandon all subtlety - but for the most part the film is a highly skilled affair, the kind of movie that would have shriveled up into an interesting but ineffective film if it wasn't for such a strong narrative voice. It is certainly not a movie for everyone, but for those that know how to appreciate a story told in conflict and tone, this movie isn't a vapid, mumblecore horror. It is a traumatic and tragic depiction of mental illness, and the foreboding knowledge of genetics. Let this be a lesson to you about polarized user review scores: sometimes, the best stuff is the most controversial. Don't see stuff that pleases everyone, see stuff that no one can agree on.
7.0
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