Relic was recommended to me by a dear friend, who texted that it felt “similar to how watching The Babadook for the first time with [me] felt.” I immediately put a hold on my local library’s DVD copy, and although it took me a while to get around to it, I can now report that this was an excellent recommendation. It’s indeed in the same vein of elevated metaphorical horror as The Babadook. In this case, dementia is represented as a haunted house, although the early stages of the haunting present very similarly to demonic possession, which also gives this 2020 picture the feeling of being a more sensitive, more expensively shot Taking of Deborah Logan. It excises Deborah Logan’s found footage elements and is instead shot more traditionally, which makes for a more sumptuous viewing experience and, one might argue, a better movie. 

Kay (Emily Mortimer) visits her family home in rural Australia, some distance from Melbourne, with daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) in tow. Kay’s mother, Edna (Robyn Nevin) has been missing for a few days, and Kay’s concern is compounded by the fact that the last time they saw one another, at Christmas, Edna was already starting to show advanced signs of dementia, including flooding the house with an overflowing bathtub. Although the house is locked from the outside, Kay and Sam fail to find evidence of Edna within. As they search the house, Sam discovers a closet upstairs with a newly installed lock, behind which is a moldy wall, which seems like evidence that Edna may be continuing to accidentally flood the place. In the evening, Sam is visited by Edna’s neighbor, a teenager with Downs Syndrome named Jamie (Chris Bunton), who tells her that he no longer visits Edna. Jamie’s father later reveals that this is because of an incident in which the two were playing hide and seek in the house, and Edna locked Jamie in the moldy closet and, despite the boy’s audible screams, forgot he was there. 

Edna suddenly reappears, dirtied and unaware that she has been missing. A doctor pays her a house call, and confirms that, other than a bruise on her chest that resembles the black mold in the house, Edna is of reasonable sound mind and body. Kay reveals to Sam that she plans to put Edna into assisted living, over Sam’s protests that either Edna could move in with Kay, or Sam could move in with Edna; Kay stresses that Edna needs the kind of care that her family can’t provide. Upon visiting a “retirement community” that promises enrichment and “ocean views” but is in actuality sad and impersonal, Kay reconsiders that course of action. Sam and Edna have some bonding time in Kay’s absence, which involves Edna giving her granddaughter an heirloom ring. Later, Edna’s personality changes completely, and she almost breaks Sam’s finger trying to reclaim the ring from her, accusing her of stealing it. Edna’s switches back and forth between her two different personalities become more frequent and unsettling, while Kay begins to have dreams about her great-grandfather, who died alone in a cabin that once stood on the same property and was undiscovered for so long that his body had begun to rot. The octagonal stained glass window, depicting an image of trees and mountains, was saved from that cabin before it was torn down and installed in Edna’s front door, and it features prominently in Kay’s nightmares as things get worse and worse. 

Relic is a film that, like mother!, is (to borrow a phrase from Lindsay Ellis) “Oops, all metaphor.” In the climax, Sam finds herself lost in a “Backrooms but an old house” liminal space behind the walls of the closet in which Edna earlier trapped Jamie. The black mold itself is hereditary dementia, something that can never be completely cleaned away and which is inevitably waiting for Kay down the road, and Sam in her time as well. The past, represented by the now long-demolished cabin and the window carried over from it, can never be completely destroyed. There are things in our genes and our DNA that we can never fully rid ourselves of, no matter how much we try to lock them in closets or nursing homes, and which we will forget, no matter how many post-it notes we write to ourselves or how many photo albums we try to protect. But that only has to be a horror show if we allow it to be. Whatever Edna is becoming is something that may not be able to be tamed with love, but which can be managed by it, and Kay’s haunted dreams are only a premonition of her own future lonely death if she creates that future herself by refusing to give and receive help (and love) when it’s available. It’s somewhat pat as a conclusion, but it must be by the very nature of existence as a story; it can’t possibly contend with all the variables that we’ll face in the real world or apply as a metaphor for people whose family structures are more dysfunctional and broken than this one is. But it’s also nevertheless rather sweet, and although the final images out of context might elicit horror, this is as happy an ending as can be expected, and I liked that about it. 

One of the things that I found most fascinating is the way that the liminal space in Edna’s house is used differently than the aforementioned Backrooms. When we discussed the film after we had both seen it, Brandon elaborated on what those spaces mean to Gen Z, how they represent a failure of the previous generation to build a world that had a future for them within it, or a future at all. The endlessly repeating “back area of a mall” location is an eldritch horror because it’s a representation of a space that has no place for them, a future filled with nothing but a vague and unknowable force endlessly replicating its own recreations of the past as its occupants toil in an infinite retail hellscape. In Relic, we see that same idea (albeit earlier) transposed to a home, one that’s too composed of the past, so full of boxes of old report cards, photographs, and dry-rotted seasonal decorations to do anyone any good. The sudden appearance of this space that Sam can’t escape, with the hallways and corridors beginning to loop back on themselves, genuinely changes our perception of what we’ve been watching so far, which has been a relatively down-to-earth parable about dementia and its similarities to the supposed hallmarks of demonic possession, into a movie that contains an evil crawlspace in which space is warped and time is bendable, representing the way that our minds can become spaces that we can no longer navigate or even comprehend. It’s a bold move, and I liked it. 

There are some who might find the “trauma is the monster” style of elevated horror played out and trite, and I understand that. As a movement within the horror genre, audiences went from flying high on quality, well-crafted, considered fare like Get Out and Hereditary in 2017 and 2018 respectively to an absolute into-the-gutter nosedive of artistic merit by 2022’s release of Smile. We’re still getting decent-to-great films in that subgenre, of course, but for every Weapons or Together, there’s a Him or a Lamb. Relic pulls it off, not least of all because this is an all-timer performance from Mortimer. I don’t normally think of her as an actress with his much gravitas or range; when she comes to mind, I mostly think “Careful, my bones!” or “Oh, yeah, she was in Scream 3.” She’s excellent here, and I’d offer major kudos to both of her co-leads. Nevin pulls off the transition from confused but kind to nasty and spiteful perfectly, and Heathcote is much more than just a pretty face. It’s stellar casting and performances all around. I’m not sure if this is streaming anywhere, but if you get the chance, it’s well worth checking out.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond