Censor (2021) ✂️📼📺

“We can’t afford to make mistakes, I’m cutting it”

Prano Bailey-Bond set her directorial debut around Enid, a 1985 British film censor with a mysterious past. She views her job as a necessary measure to protect the public from violent & exploitative direct-to-video movies, but still becomes drawn into a sinister series of events. The movie looks incredible — a magical mix of Dario Argento with Videodrome vibes — and I felt totally enthralled by lead actress Niamh Algar’s performance. The slow-burn pacing buildls to some excellent chaos in the end, and the final moments made my insides squirm.

Bailey-Bond focused her fictional story around the actual “video nasties” moral panic in the UK throughout the 1980’s. With the introduction of VHS came the public debate, led by conservative evangelicals, of whether or not it was “safe” to let the general public view exploitation movies, and thus leading to the creation of the British Board of Film Classification. In a conversation with ScreenRant, Bailey-Bond wondered “if these images are supposed to have this effect on us, what protects the censor from losing control?”. In Censor, the act of censorship itself is a kind of infectious violence, a contagion that corrupts everyone it touches.
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