Relic - Review Thread

Relic(12/12/2020)
During the height of the pandemic, when conventional theaters were closed pretty much everywhere, IFC put out two low budget horror movies for drive through theaters which gained publicity from being some of the only “new movies” that were out. The other film, The Wretched, seemed like the bigger deal at the time since it made more money but the critics seem to be remembering Relic better given that it’s shown up on some top ten lists and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Honestly I’m not sure either movie really deserved much more than a VOD release in the first place. This one in particular kind of just feels like a lesser version of a previous movie. I hope I’m not making more of the connections just because both movies are Australian horror movies directed by women but… this is really obviously a ripoff of The Babadook, is it not? Both are ostensible horror movies where a woman’s conflicted feelings about someone they’re caring for manifest as monsters. In The Babadook it was about the guilt the protagonist had for kind of hating having to deal with her autistic kid and in this it’s about a protagonist who is depressed that her mother with dementia has become something unrecognizable. I suppose there should be room for multiple movies like this much as there is room for multiple movies where masked men with knives chase teenagers around, but this one just feels decidedly lesser than its predecessor, and that’s mainly because the overt horror elements are decidedly weaker. There’s nothing here as creative as a haunted pop-up book or a silent movie coming alive, in fact there really isn’t a lot of actual horror in the first two thirds. It’s certainly lit and scored like a horror movie, but that’s mostly just being applied to fairly routine elder care. Things do finally start trying to get properly supernatural (in a metaphoric way) towards the end, but the movie had largely lost me by that point. I suppose that a second-rate The Babadook is still going to seem more valuable and creative than another second-rate Friday the 13th or The Conjuring and I do appreciate that this is at least trying to exist in a world of metaphor but at the end of the day when you feel this much like a lesser derivative of another movie you’re only ever going to impress so much.

** out of Five