[FILM REVIEW] CENSOR, DIRECTED BY PRANO BAILEY-BOND

10/8/2021

a wonderfully confident debut from Bailey-Bond with striking shots illuminated in Argento vivid reds and blues, much of the lighting provided by the reflections of screen static

CENSOR

Director: Prano Bailey-Bond
Written by: Prano Bailey-Bond and Anthony Fletcher
Certificate:15 Running Time: 84 minutes

Set during the UK Video Nasty furore of 1985, Prano Bailey-Bond’s debut feature “Censor” tells the tale of Enid, an employee of the BBFC (back when they were the British Board of Film Censors, not the British Board of Film Classification). When she watches a mysterious horror film (“Don’t go in the Church”) that could be connected to her sister’s disappearance from two decades before, she sets out to learn more of the movie and its mysterious director.

With a film so centred on its main character – Enid is present in every scene – “Censor” hinges entirely on her presence. Like Morfydd Clark in 2019’s “Saint Maud”, Niamh Algar is a revelation. She begins the movie upright, reserved and guarded, and we witness her slow and inevitable descent into hysteria – she’s nothing less than thoroughly convincing throughout.

The rest of the cast are also great; it’s refreshing to see Nicholas Burns play slightly less of a jerk than usual, and genre favourite Michael Smiley also appears as a sleazy film producer.

It’s a smart and assured horror, only straying into jump scare territory on a single occasion – which worked very well even in the small screening – with a lot of the horror coming from the imagery Enid watches at work, or from disturbing audio from those films, the actual horror only visible to her and not the cinema audience.

I’ve spoken of Peter Strickland on these hallowed pages before, and Enid’s character arc closely matches that of Toby Jones’ Gilderoy in Strickland’s “Berbarian Sound Studio” (2012), both wonderfully realised characters who find themselves getting themselves a little too involved in their jobs in cinema, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Indeed, that and “Censor” would make for the perfect double bill. Both conjure up a wonderfully convincing sense of place and time (“Berberian,” the seventies, “Censor” the eighties), both are love letters to cinema (or a “Dear John” letter, a cynic might argue) and both have similarly enigmatic and abrupt endings, leaving the viewer to decipher what they’ve just seen.

Censor looks stunning. It’s a wonderfully confident debut from Bailey-Bond with striking shots illuminated in Argento vivid reds and blues, much of the lighting provided by the reflections of screen static or the hazy gleam of a projection beam. The films-within-films we see as part of Enid’s job are authentic looking and accurately capture that cheap schlocky feel of many movies from that period.

It’s difficult to speak at length about any plot elements without straying into spoiler territory, and this is a film that deserves to be witnessed unsullied. The ambiguous ending might not be to everyone’s taste, but it accurately captures Enid’s state of mind, and, in my head, it couldn’t really end any other way. It was clear in the Q&A session after the movie how much love Prano has for cinema - and in particular, horror cinema – and I’m eager to see what she does next.

After the screening, I asked Prano how she’d fared with the BBFC herself with this movie.

“How did I fare? Oh, do you know what, they took me out for lunch, and they liked it. It’s been given a 15 certificate, which I think is fine, because I don’t think it’s an 18 film myself, but it was really interesting, because they said it was one of the most meta experiences they’ve ever had, and I wish they weren’t quite so cloak and dagger about examining their films and that we could have filmed them watching Enid watching films. They said it was really strange because they were watching Enid and Sanderson talking about films, in the way they were going to talk about this film afterwards. But they were really excited that their job was being represented on screen, and I think that’s why they were pretty interested. But they were really lovely and are such a different organisation now to what they were then.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Court is a short story author and novelist, whose works have appeared in over a dozen venues including Tales to Terrify, StarShipSofa, Visions from the Void, Fear’s Accomplice and The Voices Within. Whilst primarily a horror writer, he also writes science fiction, poetry and satire. He’s also a freelance writer for Slash Film.

His last collection, Contents May Unsettle, was re-released in 2021 and his debut comic writing has just featured in Tpub’s The Theory (Twisted Sci-Fi). As well as writing, David works as a Software Developer and lives in Coventry with his wife, three cats and an ever-growing beard. David’s wife once asked him if he’d write about how great she was. David replied that he would, because he specialized in short fiction. Despite that, they are still married.

Website: www.davidjcourt.co.uk
Twitter: @DavidJCourt