Censor review: A tactile and vivid slice of Thatcherite horror

Prano Bailey-Bond’s feature debut feels lovingly worked-at in all its period grisliness

Dir: Prano Bailey-Bond. Starring: Niamh Algar, Michael Smiley, Nicholas Burns, Vincent Franklin, Sophia La Porta. Cert 15, 84 mins

The best English horror movies understand the horrors of the English. Censor takes place in a land of creeps, scolds and curtain-twitchers. If not for the dirty underpasses and imposing tower blocks that engulf our hero, a film censor played with twitchy timidity by Niamh Algar, you’d think it was set in The League of Gentlemen’s Royston Vasey – a fictional village of small-minded eccentrics with grotesque faces and perverse secrets. The film carries that same sense of the familiar yet bizarre. You feel as if you want to scrub it off with a rough sponge as soon as it finishes.

Mary Whitehouse looms large. A doddering ghoul who haunted the Eighties with her crusades to ban everything remotely subversive and fun – from X-rated cinema to blasphemy to gay sex – she is the unspoken force wagging her finger behind Censor’s twists and turns. Algar’s Enid is in charge of enforcing Whitehouse’s worldview on the latest film releases. It is 1985, and her job is to compile reports on the countless low-budget slasher movies submitted for official classification. She watches beheadings, impalings and disarticulations with cool detachment, scribbling down each act of depravity in her notebook and determining what the British public should and shouldn’t see.

Two incidents rattle her. The first is a real-life murder seemingly inspired by a film she allowed to be released uncut. Hysteria ensues, and Enid is harassed by news reporters and anonymous callers threatening violence upon her. The second is a strange new film she is asked to view, one that stars an actor she is convinced may be her long-lost sister. Even stranger, the actor appears to be re-enacting a terrifying incident from Enid’s adolescence, one even she seems to barely remember.

If Censor becomes a bit more conventional as it builds to its climax – Black Swan, Saint Maud and the recent Black Bear all swim in similar waters – it at least feels enormously tactile and vivid while it gets there. The film is awash in neat visual and auditory touches: the artificial lighting of a rental shop with its glass counters and naughty backroom, the grainy residue on a VHS box where a promotional sticker used to be, the clunky whirr of a video being ejected from its player. Censor feels lovingly worked-at, slathered in period detail and aesthetic beauty.

Niamh Algar’s Enid is a tricky character to get a handle on (Vertigo Releasing)

Occasionally filmmaker Prano Bailey-Bond – in her feature debut – seems to have too many ideas to know what to do with. There are allusions to Thatcherite hypocrisy, moral panic as a distraction from actual social decline, and how trauma can manifest as a kind of devastating self-repression. It’s a lot. Credit goes to Algar, then, who pulls all of its threads together.

Her Enid is a tricky character to get a handle on. At times the actor – currently onscreen in Channel 4’s Deceit – seems remote in the role, wooden even, but then she gradually shows her hand. Enid is as much an observer of cinema as she is a desperate participant in it. She drifts between roles and personas in her daily life, as if she were one of the fictional women she watches in private screening rooms. There are times when she wants to be the sturdy professional standing defiant in the boys club, a la Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Elsewhere she is the valiant hero, who sets out to rescue her terrified sibling. In other moments, she is an avenging angel, blood-stained and destructive. Whatever the mode she’s in, she wants to be the girl in the movie. Tragically, she just can’t choose its genre.