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Relic Movie Review

Relic is a 2020 Australian horror drama film directed by Natalie Erika James and starring Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin and Bella Heathcote. It’s a moving film.

A woman links her mother’s increasingly volatile behavior to an evil presence at their family’s decaying country home. At first, I thought I was in for a standard demonic possession storyline. However, it eventually changed into a drama about death and aging. That was done for better and for worse, so let’s dive in.

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Whenever they make a horror film that is unlike your typical horror movie, but more like a drama, the audience reception is going to be harsh while the critical reception is going to be glowing. That’s the case with this movie as well. I personally stand in the middle. I find the movie definitely pretty good, but far from great as it’s never as creepy as it should have been.

As a drama about madness and the deterioration of the human mind, Relic succeeds wildly. It’s a film that deals with the descent into madness and approaching death of a loved one and how devastating that can be for the family. The final sequence with the daughter, mother and grandmother all hugging and the granny devolving into a kind of a monster form was both unsettling and deeply heartbreaking. It’s the type of body horror that may seem obvious, but it’s executed so well as a great metaphor that it works entirely.

Relic doesn’t quite work as a horror movie in the first half. They did try to make this house as scary as possible, but it was all for nothing as it ended up being a film about the human mind and not any demon or else. Still, the cinematography is so great, the dialogue is excellent and the human emotion at display is so powerful that the movie did work for me, albeit the slow pace robbed it of momentum at first. As for the performances, all three of these competent ladies are terrific with Robyn Nevin being the highlight in such a tragic role.

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Relic is definitely the type of horror movie that appeals more to the critics than to gore-thirsty genre enthusiasts. Its slow pace in the first half seriously robbed it of its momentum and it’s much more so a drama than it is a horror movie, but it undeniably succeeds as this creepy and very tragic film about the approaching death of a loved one and the deterioration of the human mind. The performances are uniformly terrific and the final sequence is so amazing in its unsettling imagery and powerful emotion.