We ask: “Why are almost all horror films starring women?” If we followed the roots of women's horror movies, or as they are called “last girl” films, that means that in the end we will finish at Halloween 1978 for John Carpenter.
The cinema of horror is full of varied equations and harmonious or opposite waves, sometimes the victims of the murderer are teenage boys, sometimes girls, and sometimes a family in which the father dies first, and the struggle between the evil element against the mother and her daughter is limited.
In other words, what we have seen in the past 40 years has been the equation of the Halloween movie that occurs continuously according to the requirements of generations, and of course according to the power of influencing the psyche of the audience, for example, watching a girl facing the masked killer is better than the shot of a man facing him, because the conflict scenarios in the case of the girl are open to the possibilities More than a man's condition.
A man against a persuasive killer may be an equal struggle, but a girl is against a killer, so here we know that the girl is the weakest element, and therefore we will care more about the course of the conflict. Horror films opened the way more to contain the relationship between a couple against an evil entity (The Conjuring), and the couple's relationship is strengthened whenever the entity encounters a demon in this movie, but in the end the wife deals a devastating blow to the devil.
These films also deal with the relationship between a mother and her daughter against a demon, and the man here is a chaplain (the most famous example is The Exorcist, exorcist William Verden 1973), and now he entered what appears to be a new wave and is a struggle of a grandmother, a mother and a granddaughter against an evil entity. Today, we have a Relic movie that copies the same equation: grandmother, mother and granddaughter against a mysterious entity.
But Relic is very different in its composition, as it can be viewed from two angles at the same time, the first being a demonic or mysterious entity wholly possessing a member of the family, while the rest are trying to save him knowing that they are heading towards a dark or mysterious end without a solution. Examples: Rosemarys Baby 1968, Hereditary in 2018 and the second draws inspiration from the first.
The second is a person who suffers from a mysterious madness in the eyes of the rest of the family. Kay (Emily Mortimer) is a mother of an upset teenager named Samantha (Bella Heathcote). Police inform Kai that her mother and grandmother Samantha, Edna (Robin Nevin) have been missing for several days.
The mother and daughter rush to the grandmother's spacious house, which of course is located in a secluded area built of wood and behind a forest, because without these specifications we will not have a horror movie! After two days, Kai gave up and lost hope that Edna would appear, but the grandmother suddenly appeared without introductions in the kitchen, and her feet were filthy black. But frighteningly, she behaves normally as if nothing had happened.
Edna asks, "Where has everyone gone?", The question is puzzling because everyone is there. A doctor who is "oblivious" to the logic of the film appears and speaks in a medical language, like all horror film doctors to say: "Edna is old and suffers from dementia, and all her actions are normal in this context, and she needs special care in an elderly home."
The two women take Edna to her home and discuss whether she can get her into a nursing home. While they are in this debate, strange things begin to happen to Edna and the home, which are neither explained nor explained because this is not the goal of the movie.
There is a black spot crawling on the wall facing to the ceiling, there is a movement sound inside the walls, there is a feeling that the walls themselves move, there is a body covered with blackness that walks behind Kay, as well as a washing machine that works on its own. In addition to a gruesome snapshot of Edna, she opens her shirt to see a huge black spot covering her chest, to which he stabs with a knife whenever she is mad.
Director Natalie Erika James, and this is her first directorial experience, which she co-wrote the text with Christian White, relies on the fundamentals of a well-known horror cinema, such as mysterious voices, small leaf clippings that Edna hangs in places to remind her of the time of the medicine, and other scribes written with mysterious phrases such as: «« Don't follow him. ”
In addition to footage of the vestibules of the house, and one of the scenes of a dark vestibule, the last of which is a door in which Natalie uses the "German corner" style. This particular shot is highlighted by the director in a remarkable way in the middle of the film and apart from its scenes.
In the second half of the movie, events accelerate and Natalie makes use of her three best actresses. There is no actress with nothing to do. The grandmother lives her shifts and the mother tries to understand the causes of the shifts, not believing that what is happening due to the invisible powers, at the same time Samantha enters a wheel to discover a hidden world behind him and get lost in it.
There is an illogical scene and it appears that Natalie crafted it to link two scenes that could have been linked in another way. The grandmother in the bathroom sits in the bathtub, which is completely filled with water overflowing to pour on the floor. The camera goes to an electrical outlet between the bath and the toilet, apparently connected to a heater.
The question: “In what kind of bathrooms in the world does the contractor put an electrical socket in this place that it is impossible for the water not to reach it?” .. Of course the water arrives and turns off the electricity due to an electric shock, and the camera moves out of the house to see that its lights are completely turned off.
Was there no other way to turn off the light! It is known that the electricity sockets in the bathrooms are next to the mirror and away from the tap or water sources, but it seems that Natalie wanted to impose a link to two scenes that are not logically connected. Or that the bathrooms are in Australia, where the story revolves with sockets next to the water source, which we completely exclude.
The film contains symbolic scenes, such as a grandma shot eating her memories in the nearby forest, which suggests that she is trying to protect her memories from that mysterious entity in the house that might symbolize Alzheimer's disease.
The end of the movie is dark and traditional at the same time, but the lesson is not at the end nor even in explaining what is happening. The lesson in the director’s ability in her first experience to make a horror movie with high standards, and to make excellent use of the characters and elements of the classic horror cinema, and to create frightening scenes, we may have seen similar ones previously, but they harmonize deeply in the context of a general atmosphere of tension and fear that envelops a state of psychological conflict that falls within Greater struggle against hidden powers.
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The end of the film is dark and traditional at the same time, but the lesson is not at the end nor even in explaining what is happening.
The film contains symbolic scenes, such as a grandmother shot eating images of her memories in the nearby forest, which suggests that she is trying to protect her memories.
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