Nasty Video

I had hoped that Censor (2021) would be a decent horror movie, but it turned out to be more of a giallo ... maybe? Psychological thriller? Whatever it was, it was certainly tense.

It stars Naimh Algar as a censor in Britain during the Thatcher era. There was a moral panic about "video nasties" - violent movies released straight to VHS. She was part of a team, a fairly loose, friendly group, of censors, trying to keep these from harming the public. She was always strict but fair, a normal if slightly tight-wound young woman.

She meets with her parents, who tell her that they are declaring her sister dead. She went missing while playing with Algar as a child, but Algar believes that she was kidnapped and is still alive. (We see some of this in flashbacks and dreams.) She and her parents have a typically British relationship, where nothing unpleasant can be discussed.

Algar is reviewing a film by noted nasty director Frederick North (Adrian Schiller). She notices similarities in the movie to her sisters disappearance. After finding some of his older, illegal stuff, she notices that the actress looks a lot like her and her sister. She begins to suspect that her sister was trafficked, abused, and is now being used by the video nasty industry. So she goes to find Frederick North.

Around here, I'd usually quit the plot summary, because I want to go easy on spoilers and give people who want to see the movie a chance. But I'll just barrel ahead. Algar goes to meet North's producer, trying to find where he is. He tries to convince her to try out for the lead in North's latest movie, being filmed now, because she looks so much like the lead. Then he tries to rape her. When she pushes him off, he lands on one of his awards, and winds up impaled upon it. She rushes out to the film shoot, and finds it's being set in a creepy cabin in the woods - just like where she lost her sister. North thinks she's playing the sister, and gets her psyched up to release her inner demons. And when the actor playing the killer starts menacing the actress playing her "sister", she snaps and starts killing people with an axe.

This is a very atmospheric movie, with lots of dingy offices, threatening patriarchy, and creepy sound work - reminded me a little of Berberian Sound Studio that way. First time director Prano Bailly-Bond does a good job capturing Algar's fracturing psyche. I'm not sure that the moral - These video nasties really do drive you mad - is what we need to hear, but it made for a good story. Not quite what we were looking for, though.