Starring Niamh Algar, Nicholas Burns, Adriian Schiller, Michael Smiley

Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond

 Magnet Releasing, out now

After viewing a strangely familiar video nasty, Enid, a film censor, sets out to solve the mystery of her sister’s disappearance, embarking on a quest that dissolves the line between fiction and reality.

It’s 1985 and Margaret Thatcher’s Tory government and the British press are having a fine time vilifying ‘Video Nasties’ and blaming them for the ills of society. It’s against this backdrop that Prano Bailey-Bond (she co-writes with Anthony Fletcher and directs) sets her feature debut feature about a censor’s descent into darkness.

Although not actually name checked as the BBFC (presumably for legal reasons) Enid (Niamh Algar, Raised by Wolves) is working for the British film censorship board, and is proud of her work. She demands that an eye gouging be removed from a movie because it’s too realistic, and downright rejects ‘Cannibal Carnage.’ As she reminds her parents, it’s not entertainment, it’s to protect people.

While Enid is quite the moral crusader, the press jump on a decision that she and her fellow censor Sanderson (a pretentious, Shakespeare-spouting Nicholas Burns) made to release movie Deranged about a man who eats someone’s face. A man in real-life, who they’ve daubed the Amnesiac Killer, has now killed his wife by the same means, and the tabloids are having a field day about this copycat killer, blaming the two censors directly.

But the main thrust of the film is a moment in Enid’s past where she was out with her young sister, who then disappeared. She’s still missing, presumed dead, but looks remarkably like the actress in a film called Don’t Go in the Church by horror auteur Frederick North (Adrian Schiller). This becomes an obsession for Enid, who investigates the movie’s producer (a smarmy Michael Smiley, Kill List) and then the film-maker’s movie set.

Once Enid goes down this rabbit hole, she loses her grip with reality, and there’s a great use of different film stock and aspect ratios by cinematographer Anika Summerson to disorient us. She also employs bright primary colours in her lighting to remind us of the colour schemes of 70s and 80s Italian gialli thrillers and splatter pics. The soundtrack by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch also has a wonderful retro edge when Enid starts losing her grip, and is pitched perfectly.

For someone who grew up in the middle of the hysteria that led to the Video Recordings Act 1984, and rented said movies before they became illegal, there’s much to enjoy in seeing this recreation of the period, from the seedy video shop with VHS cassettes in brown paper packaging, to the droning sound bites of arguments by politicians on TV. The main story draws on similar themes from Videodrome and 8mm, with a homegrown feel of a Ben Wheatley movie.

I enjoyed it and commend it for using the subject matter in a fictional way. One of my arguments as a teenager was ‘Why is it ok for censors to watch these movies, but not me? Why do these allegedly harmful scenes not rot their brains too?’ On the evidence of this movie, it looks like the government, press and censors were right all along – that the movies really can rot your brain and turn you bad.

Verdict: An assured, confident feature debut, building on the director’s own short movie, and a well-packaged combination of polemic and gore. 8/10

Nick Joy