My enthusiasm dissipated however when I read Gav Crimson’s review of the film - a detailed and all-too-believable dismissal which sets out a catalogue of anachronisms, missed opportunities and failures on the part of the filmmakers to effectively engage with their chosen subject matter. Oh well.
Suitably forewarned, I took a “walk don’t run” approach to checking out ‘Censor’, but finally caught up with it last month through the eerie medium of streaming. [In view of the film’s subject, it feels weirdly ironic that I chose to ‘rent’ it for 48 hours from the BFI.] I’m happy to report though that, although Mr Crimson’s conclusions are essentially correct, I nonetheless found a lot more to enjoy here than he did, overcoming some pretty severe mixed feelings to eventually come away with a fairly positive assessment of the film.Which doesn’t exactly sound like a whole-hearted recommendation, I’ll grant you, but… if you can engage with ‘Censor’ on its own terms, there is a lot of good stuff here. In terms of direction, visuals and performances in fact, I’d probably rank ‘Censor’ as one of the most effective and enjoyable films to have emerged from the post-2010 wave of UK art-horror pictures. At the same time though, well - let’s just say there’s a lot to unpack here too.
For a start, and as concisely summarised in the above-linked review, historical verisimilitude is all over the place. In spite of ‘Censor’s shamelessly retromantic fixation on the aesthetic of early 1980s, Bailey-Bond & Anthony Fletcher’s script is full of details both large and small which simply don’t ring true, holding together a series of plot developments which feel wildly unlikely, to put it mildly.
As the film’s story unfolds though, we come to realise that at least some of its more far-fetched events could easily be chalked up to the old “unreliable narrator” factor; and besides, at the end of the day, this is a heavily stylised psychological horror film, and I mean, it’s not like we watch ‘Deep Red’ to get a realistic picture of the life of young creatives in Turin in 1975, right?
On that basis alone, I feel I should extend ‘Censor’ the same courtesy, especially given that (along with the film’s director, I’m assuming), I was busy making my debut at play school at around the time the notorious Video Recordings Act was being fast-tracked through the Commons.
Perhaps more worryingly though, at a certain point whilst watching ‘Censor’, I also found myself concerned that the film might be taking a “the people who make these movies are sick and perverted and basically one step away from being serial murderers” kind of stance, rather akin to the approach Paul Schrader's ‘Hardcore’ (1979) took to pornography. Not exactly a good way to get us horror fans on side, needless to say.
Thankfully though, the film swerves away somewhat from this trajectory during its final act, instead instigating a script-flipping shift in perspective (‘twist’ doesn’t really cover it), the details of which will remain unspoiled here, despite being fairly obvious/inevitable in retrospect.
Though the lingering suggestion that the world of low budget genre cinema is a weird, alienating, sleazy and dangerous place to do business may still rankle with some viewers, on the whole I thought that the film’s big narrative turnaround was very nicely handled, packing an appropriate emotional punch.
And, once again, we need to remember that this is a horror movie, with all that that entails. If the people and situations our protagonist Enid (Niamh Algar) encountered in the lower depths of the film industry were friendly, respectful and welcoming, it’s safe to say ‘Censor’ would not exactly have hit its mark, tonally speaking. As it is, the film builds a Ramsey Campbell-esque atmosphere of liminal unease that I actually found quite effective, in spite of the concerns outlined above.
Although the world of the ‘Censor’s fictional horror director Frederick North isn’t as fleshed out as I might have liked, I nonetheless enjoyed the material dealing with his films. More than anything though, I just found myself wishing I could watch them. I mean, why DIDN’T we have some kind of British answer to Lucio Fulci lurking about in Sussex woods making weird, atmospheric gore films in blatant defiance of the Thatcher/Whitehouse brigade? That would clearly have been amazing. His absence from reality surely marks a collective cultural failure, which we in the UK should regret daily.
Whether it was consciously intended as a joke or otherwise, I liked the fact that North’s magnum opus ‘Don’t Go In The Church’ does not appear to feature a church, and, whilst on the subject, I also very much enjoyed Michael Smiley’s turn as the director’s sleazebag producer, a role which surely cementing his place as the closest thing 21st century UK cinema has to a fully paid up, never-knowingly-underacting ‘horror man’ (following his equally memorable performances in ‘Kill List’ (2010), ‘A Field in England’ (2013) and ‘The Toll’ (2021), amongst others).
Likewise, I also appreciated the detail of the scenes set within the offices of ‘Censor’s thinly fictionalised version of the BBFC. It is here that the film crosses over slightly into the realm of that distinctly British ‘comedy of awkwardness’ which has become such a ubiquitous element of 21st century UK horror, and whilst this kind of stuff is not usually my bag, in this case I found spending time with Enid’s mismatched colleagues to be more comforting than hellish, with their portrayals veering more toward the humane/relatable than the overtly grotesque.
In fact, I found myself quite taken with the idea of hanging around all day in a pokey pre-fab office with a bunch of failed academics and social workers, drinking tea, filing reports and watching films to obsessively count the “shit”s and “fuck”s. Aside from the inherently objectionable business of having to actually cut / ban films, that actually strikes me as a pretty great job. Given that they rarely do much cutting or banning these days, I was almost tempted to call up the BBFC’s website to see if they’re recruiting at the moment, and what kind of background they require, etc.
Meanwhile, ‘Censor’s overall aesthetic struck me as being very much on the same page as Peter Strickland’s recent ‘In Fabric’ (2018), mixing beautifully phantasmagorical neon/gel lighting and baroque, Argento-esque production design with painstakingly fetishised period detail and low key/naturalistic performances to create - especially in its latter half - a similarly vertiginous disjuncture between fantasy and reality (though I personally found Bailey-Bond’s film a less discomforting and more conventionally rewarding experience than Strickland’s).
One visual device I particularly liked - and which I don’t recall ever seeing previously - is the way ‘Censor’ plays with aspect ratio and film grain across its run-time. An idea which would presumably have been nixed on the grounds of expense and impracticality back in the pre-digital era, this now of course feels entirely appropriate to this archly referential horror film-about-horror films. (Once again, Strickland springs to mind here as a reference point, particularly vis-à-vis the intertextual monkey business which characterised ‘Berbarian Sound Studio’ (2012).)
When I first noticed horizontal bars appearing at the edges of the screen, I thought something had gone wrong with the streaming platform, but soon realised that this was deliberate as the film begins to move back and forth between scope anback and forth from “reality” to “video nasty-vision”.
This is a neat trick, and a nice wink to cinephiles and survivors of the format wars in the audience, but it also serves to foreground the suggestion that watching violent videos has actually warped our vulnerable protagonist’s mind beyond all recognition - a problematic notion which is never really sufficiently explored or resolved by Bailey-Bond’s film, for all its visual pyrotechnics and technical acumen.
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