Relic movie review: Chilling trip to places we don’t want to go

Robyn Nevin in Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James’s Relic. Picture: Jackson Finter/Stan

Relic, the feature debut of Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James, opens with an overflowing bathtub. The water trickles down the stairs and pools at someone’s feet. The camera moves back and we see an elderly woman, naked but for a towel in her hand.

This is Edna (a mesmerising Robyn Nevin). She is in her 80s, widowed and living alone in a huge house on the outskirts of Melbourne.

We then cut to her daughter, Kay (English actor Emily Mortimer) speaking to the police. Her mother has gone missing. Kay and her adult daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) go to the house. Inside there’s evidence of hoarding. There are also post-it notes stuck in every room. Some are simple: Turn off tap. Take pills. Flush. But one reads: Don’t follow it.

This, however, is not a missing person story. The next morning, when Kay and Sam awake, Edna is in the kitchen, making tea. She refuses to talk about why she went away or where she went to. She has a dark bruise on her chest. She does tell them that something — it — has been attempting to get into the house.

The house is old and creaky. There are dark stains on the walls. There are noises behind the walls. There are rooms that lead to rooms that lead to rooms. When Kay sleeps she has a dream that takes her to a shed in the yard. Inside the shed she sees a corpse or near-corpse. Is she revisiting a childhood nightmare, an imagined bogey man, or is she remembering something real? The shed is no longer on the property.

That real or imagined question is sustained throughout. This is a chilling horror movie, scripted by the director and Australian novelist Christian White, that might have no horror in it. What we see might just be a manifestation of Edna’s slide into dementia. Or it might be something else altogether. Edna likes to carve models, which means sharp knives are to hand.

The tension is wire-tight and the main causes of that are Edna and the house itself, which thanks to Charlie Sarroff’s claustrophobic camerawork becomes a character in its own right. Nevin commands every scene she is in. Her stare — bewildered? Frightened? Cold? Deranged? — takes the breath away. She reminded me of Deanna Dunagan as the grandmother in M. Night Shyamalan’s creepy 2015 thriller The Visit.

The long final sequence takes us into places we don’t want to go. I am glad, as a moviegoer, that I saw the final moments, but at the same time I would like to erase them from my memory.