A woman working as a film censor in the 80s is shocked to discover a horror movie that recreates a traumatic incident from her childhood
The act of censorship cuts to the heart of this lairy, seedy, insidious pulp-horror melodrama from first-time feature director Prano Bailey-Bond, with images and ideas developed from her short Nasty. (She must have thought about using that title again, but Censor has the right technocratic chill.) The film is partly about the way censorship is a cousin to the more value-free business of editing, making sense of experience by cutting things out and rearranging the remaining parts. Memory is a selective, editorial act.
It is 1985 in
Britain, a time of dialler phones, VHS rentals and indoor smoking, the ruling classes grimly waiting out the miners’ strike and the press in a panic about “video nasties”. Niamh Algar plays Enid, a depressed woman who, with great conscientiousness and professionalism, works as a film censor. (Although, in fact, it was in 1984 that the
British Board of Film Censors cut the grumpy, puritan word “censor” and changed its name to the British Board of Film Classification.)