Relic

Do you know where you were, Mum? I suppose I went out. What's this? I was on the property when your grandfather inherited it. His mind wasn't there in the end. You can't put Gran in a room. She can't live on her own anymore. She has to be watched. Everything alright, Gran? I thought this was where it got in. Whoever was coming into the house. Mum, what is it? It's here. Under the bed. There's nothing under the bed, Mummy. Will you check for me? Hello, Sydney. Hi? Who is this? It's your killer host! My name is Parker, your resident horror fanatic. This week I told Caroline and Ian, shoo, get out of here so that you and I can have another little date episode.

So settle in and cozy up. Welcome to What's your favorite scary movie? What's your favorite scary movie is a horror film podcast where we're on a journey to find our favorite scary movie one at a time. Whether you hate them or love them, join us and discover yours. Spoilers ahead, so plan your movie screening every weekend before the episode release. Welcome back to another episode. Just the two of us, me Parker, and you, my favorite listener. This week I'm so excited because we have new horror movies to talk about. It's been a bit of a dry season during this pandemic isolation, but I am so excited to be back and talking about a highly anticipated new entry in the prestige intellectual hereditary midsummer, The Witch Get Out.

Canon Relic. I've been hearing a lot of hype for this movie, and I just could not wait to get my hands on it. Obviously, Relic was released this year, the year of Corona, 2020. It was co-written and directed by Natalie Erica James and co-written by Christian White, and it was both of their feature debuts. Congratulations, Natalie and Christian. Relic stars Emily Mortimer as Kay. Obviously, we all know her from Scream 3 Baby, but also she is a pretty big name, so I wouldn't be surprised if you know her from other places too. Relic also stars Bella Heathcote in the role of Sam. She was in The Neon Demon and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, both from the year 2016.

And finally, the performer who plays Edna is Robin Nevin. She was in the two Matrix sequels, both from 2003, which I need to hear the facts on because I did not know they came out the same year, and the TV series Top of the Lake. The Rotten Tomatoes information for Relic, as of this recording, so it definitely might have changed by the time you are listening, is a 98% from critics. And since I'm recording before the film has released, there is not yet information for the audience score. I would like to say that the average rating from critics is a 7.9 out of 10, which I think is important. And the critics consensus says Relic ratchets up.

It's slowly building tension in an expertly crafted atmosphere of dread, adding up to an outstanding feature debut for director, co-writer Natalie Erica James. Now, whenever I'm reviewing a movie alone, I like to give you guys the full skinny on the events of the movie. Again, as I stated in the intro, there are spoilers coming ahead, and this summary has all those hot deets that you're waiting for. So if you want to see the movie first, click away now and come back later. But this little baby opens on a festive Christmas home where old granny Edna has flooded her tub, a very expensive oopsie, and stands naked before her holiday tree. A figure appears in the shadows.

Perhaps it is as every single summary I read of this movie states, the ghost of dementia? We shall see. The following year Edna's daughter Kay and Kay's daughter Sam are headed to Gran's house because no one has seen her in a hot sack. She is in fact not home. It seems Kay has been a bit estranged from her mother and is alarmed at a few red flags such as Edna leaving food out for their dog, the late Chester, mysterious locks on doors that don't typically need to be locked, and sticky notes posted around the house saying things like take your pills, and flush above the toilet. One night they hear loud banging from inside the walls, sometimes in response to their own knocking, and uh they decide to sleep on it.

Kay has nightmares of her grandfather's death in a cabin that used to be on the property. The next morning, Edna returns, and Kay is alarmed by her dirty feet and lack of memory, but Sam assures her these are deaf normal things, and no, Edna should not go to a nursing home, even though it is clear that she should, especially when we audience members see a nasty bruise on Edna's chest. Gran continues to display extremely alarming and increasingly violent displays of deteriorating mental health, and the dark shadow ghost from the opening scene makes a few pretty spooky appearances. The tipping point for Sam is when she learns that their sweet neighbor with Down syndrome, Jamie, was playing hide and seek with Edna when she locked him in a closet and forgot about him for hours before his father came and saved him.

Sam goes to investigate the closet where the offense occurred and discovers a maze inside the walls of the house that she soon becomes trapped in. Kay and Edna have dinner wondering where Sam is when Edna pees herself and then locks herself in the bathroom where she stabs herself repeatedly in her now extremely bruised chest. Kay chases her into the maze where Edna becomes full-on demon Granny, slicing up her face and breaking her brittle bones as she tries to chase Kay, a la Samara from the ring. Kay and Sam escape just as Edna reaches them and then in a tussle, Kay bashes Edna in the head. Sam and Kay are going to leave her, but Kay spies a sticky note that reads, I am loved.

For some reason, this causes Kay to lock Sam outside the house and carry her mom to her bed, where her skin starts peeling off of her body. Beneath the skin is what one might initially think is the live-action corpse fish that Spongebob tries to sell chocolate to. But is actually the ghost that was haunting the house earlier in the film. Kay snuggles her corpse ghost mom and Sam barges in to get in on the generational spooning. They all live happily ever after, except Kay's shoulder, which has a very spooky bruise on it. Now, you may have detected a little bit of skepticism in my summary there and the way that I've discussed this movie thus far.

And I just want to say from the beginning that I always really want to love movies. I never want to watch a movie and hate it. I never watch a movie to hate it. But with that said, guys, relic, it's not it. I was so excited for this movie. Everyone's saying it's the next hereditary. And I can tell you right now, it is indeed not the next hereditary. And honestly, take my review and my criticisms with a grain of salt, because from all of the uh reviews and feedback I've seen so far, I seem to definitely be in the minority here. As with any movie, I definitely think if you're even slightly interested in seeing it, go see it.

What's there to lose? It might be your thing even if it's not mine. But to start out on a positive note, because that is always the way to start, that's always the way I want to start. This film has some really killer special effects. I was reading that the director, Natalie Erica James, was very specific about wanting to use uh practical special effects and only use visual effects to kind of gloss it up uh in post. And you can really see that. I thought it was very visceral, the way that this the leathery skin on the corpses is. It looks very icky. And when the skin is being peeled off of Edna, like it looks very textured, and like I could just reach out and peel that skin right off for myself from my couch.

And I always love a good practical effect. I've said it many times on the podcast. I want to look at a special effect and feel like I understand what that would feel like to touch. And a lot of times, you know, when you see The Curse of Law Yorona and you see these computer ghost people, that's not the way it is. This movie has incredible effects, and I love it. And also, this is the director directoral debut of Natalie Erica James. And I have to say, there is a steady hand directing this film. You can see a lot of intention and craft put into this movie, and I'm very excited to see what she has next, which, according to an interview in Fangoria, she has many ideas coming up that she's pitching, including, she said, a Rosemary's Baby-esque project, some body horror, some demon stuff.

So I really look forward to seeing those other projects. On to the things that I did not love so much. So before they got lost in the house maze, I actually found the ghost scenes extremely frightening and tense. I was like shaking watching this, and there are a couple of, you know, fake out jumps. You know, they're building the tension, and then Edna drops a book on the floor and Kay jumps and hits her head on the bed frame. I jumped right out of my chair on that. I even part way through the film found myself at kind of a tipping point. Before Sam goes into the maze, I thought to myself, wow, this is really scary, and it has the potential to really go all out and get me.

And I was really excited about where it was going. I was I could feel that I was watching something that could potentially be very special and exciting, and then just really that maze did not do it for me. And I was very disappointed that they kind of left the ghost portion of the movie in the dust there. And since all the summaries that I had read were very open about saying that they were being haunted by the ghost of dementia, that really removed the shock of that whole skin peeling sequence for me. Uh, I knew that I was going to watch this movie. I knew that it was highly anticipated and that I wanted to review it for the podcast, so I actually avoided watching trailers, and I had only read a summary here or there, and they all said, you know, being haunted by the ghost of dementia.

So I was like, okay, cool, that's what it's basically about. But it is just so strange to me that that is the kind of prevailing summary going around the internet when it is pretty much a spoiler. But if you think about it, actually it's not really because we know that's what the grandma is struggling with. The twist is that the ghost is the dementia. And so it's strange that also it's not a big twist. It just is the movie. I don't even know what I'm saying there, but it's just kind of a frustrating reveal, in my opinion. A beautiful reveal, yes, but a frustrating one nonetheless, because what really changes when we find out that the ghost is the manifestation of Edna's mental health.

That doesn't mean that she's going to stop deteriorating mentally or that Sam and Kay are suddenly going to be able to take care of her. I really don't understand what the purpose of the end of the movie is plot-wise. I'll talk more about what I think it is thematically later, but just on the basis of what the movie is, I'm not totally sure that this ending offers me anything. As we've discussed before on the podcast, there's always a spot in horror movies, or you know, even all movies, where there's some sort of thematic metaphor going on, and at certain points that metaphor has to be suspended to, you know, progress the action of the story. But in my opinion, the whole maze situation in the house was so weird to me because instead of exploring the metaphorical ghost haunting and the, you know, complex psychological elements of that haunting, they put Kay and Sam straight into Edna's experience of dementia.

That's what the maze is, is they're disoriented in their own home. And that interview with Fangoria, Natalie Erica James, said that she was inspired by a documentary she was watching in Alzheimer's, where the where a man said that he would get lost in his own home and that that was something frightening to her, the idea of not being able to find your way to your kitchen and feeling like a stranger and what should be a comforting place. Of course, in a piece for Collider, she also said that the primary overall inspiration for this movie was from personal experiences with her grandmother's dementia. But for the actual house maze, the inspiration was from this documentary on Alzheimer's.

So she takes that quite literally and plops it into the movie and puts Kay and Sam into that experience. And maybe I'm missing something or not thinking about it correctly, which I hate thinking, but that's how I kind of viewing this whole movie. Like, what am I missing? So maybe I am missing something, but that just seems extraneous to the message of the film to me. The difficulty of having compassion for your family members is that you cannot put yourself in their shoes and know what they're going through. That's kind of, in my opinion, the like romanticism of like a family bond is that you have to love your family members, at least if we're I'll talk more about this in a minute, but at least if we're looking through this kind of Hollywood happy ending story.

Like you have to go outside of yourself and be selfless to love your family members, which is I think what this movie is trying to say. But of course, Kay and Sam will want to help Gran out after they've experienced all the shit that she's gone through, literally. And that leads me to my final frustration. I personally love a mean horror movie. Uh, you can probably tell by the movies that I like on the podcast. I love the Evil Dead remake. I even think Scream is a very mean movie. Sometimes when I watch the finale of Scream, I'm like, oh, this is upsetting. So but I want to be uncomfortable and I want to experience that when I'm watching horror movies.

Not saying that they have to to be good. Of course, that's just my opinion, my stance. But this happy ending where they discover that the specter they were afraid to confront the whole time was within Edna, and they have to band together through family bonds to be victorious, gives me fucking cavities. I'm sorry. It does. Like that is just so over-the-top sweet. And yes, we see Kay has a bruise and it's spooky and foreboding. The internet tells me, so it has to be true, that dementia and Alzheimer's can be hereditary. But where's the fear? Where's the horror? This gives me nothing to be haunted by after the movie ends. And that's really what you want is to be thinking about this movie and chewing on it.

I remember I had nightmares about the witch for like a week after I saw it, even though after I left the theater, I was like, yeah, that was good. But I just kept thinking about that movie. There's really none of that here for me. Again, going to that Fingoria interview, Natalie Erica James discussed how this movie also looks at the cyclic the cyclical nature of care in between family members. You know, there's a line in the movie about how Gran changes Kay's nappies when she's a baby and now Kay has to do the same for Graham. I guess that leads me into my next point because that obligation to love and care for your family members, uh, the idea that family is unconditional is so heteronormative to me.

I'm not speaking to my own relationship with my family members. It's just this idea that your relationship with your parents or your parents' relationship with you or your siblings is set in stone and it's not earned is always upsetting to me. You know, I'm part of the LGBTQ plus community, and such a big uh idea in the gay community or the queer community is the idea of chosen family, and that you invest in the people who invest the same in you. And there's this kind of um brewing dissension within the ranks in this family between Edna and Kay, that she was perhaps estranged for various reasons, and that Edna and her have had a lot of conflict.

I'm not saying that that has to be permanent, but just this the way it comes off to me in this movie is that they've had this falling out and there have been no amends, that they really are not tight and they have not discussed what's going on, but that in the end she sees her mom and it's like, well, I have to care for her. And to me, that just didn't feel earned, that Edna had really put in the work to build that relationship or repair that relationship with Kay. Not saying that that wasn't earned through the script, that wasn't a criticism of the movie, but more of just the relationship, just the lens that that was seen through was a little disappointing to me.

And on top of that, I think that sometimes tough decisions are what's best for the people you love. And putting Edna in a home might suck. You know, Sam is really not interested in doing that, and Kay cries after she sees that nursing home, which honestly, that was the most depressing nursing home I've ever seen in my life, so I don't know. Uh I I completely understand. I don't know why she had to choose that one. It looked like a hospital. But the film clearly demonstrates that Kay and Sam are not capable of caring for Edna. She is off the rails, and they just are not equipped for it. And so yeah, Edna would be safest and the most healthy probably in an assisted living facility.

And this the movie has uh it seems to me a little like anti-nursing home, but in my opinion, that's probably where Edna would be the best off. So again, not to like shit on this movie, because like I said, I think it's well crafted and it's beautiful and it has some very like palpable tension at some points, it just really goes off the rails for me. Even in the maze scene, I think it's just not very the way that it the the disorientation is presented is not very panicking to me. I think about Mother, Dere the Darien Aronofsky film. I hated that movie. I was so uncomfortable watching it. I had a horrible time watching it, which you know is kind of the point of that movie, and there was such like a a sense of despair the whole time that nothing could work out, that nothing happy could happen, but it just kept going and it was almost just like this gauntlet of you know oppression.

And that that was just really missing in this movie to me. But I guess in the end, we should just, you know, take the kindness to heart. Maybe we all need a little kindness right now, and even though that was frustrating to me from what I want in a horror movie, that's not what they gave us. So, you know, I always think kindness is key. There's the scene where Edna's eating the photos from her photo album and then goes to bury them, and she says to Kay, I wish I could bury my soul so that it, the the monster, can't get at me. And in the end, it seems that that would be the wrong decision, and that by sharing her soul, her creepy, crusty corpse baby self with Kay, that is the only way that they could find, you know, reparations in the end.

So who am I to shit on that? Maybe we should all go be a little kinder to each other. And uh share our own corpse baby selves with each other. Damn it, maybe the sweetness isn't so bad after all. Slide into my DMs if you want to come spoon my inner corpse. There aren't really any murders in this movie. So my most memorable moment of relic is one that I mentioned earlier, where Edna is in her bed and she asks Kay to look under the bed because something Things under there. And she looks and you really look hard. It's kind of that trick on YouTube when you show your friend scary videos where it'll be like, turn up the sound and look very closely, or you'll miss it, and then the whole screen is like and you scream and run away.

You know, it's so dark under Edna's bed, and I was really looking, and then there's that kind of heave of breath from the monster laying underneath, and then Kay throws a book on or Edna throws a book on the ground and Kay yelps. I honestly that's one of the best jump scares. Oh my goodness. I can't believe I forgot about this. So, yes, that is a very good jump scare, probably one of my favorites in a movie that I've seen in a while because it really scared me, but scratch all that because right before that, the most incredible thing happens. Kay is awoken from her slumber because Edna is, you know, about to sneak out the front door, and you see her in her nightgown walking to the door, hair billowing behind her, and Kay says, like, Mom, and you think that perhaps she will turn around and look, but instead her hand reaches back and lifts up her hair, and she has been facing the camera the whole time, just with all of her hair hanging in front of her face, again, Samara style, or I guess Sidako, if we're looking at the OG.

And I was obsessed with that. I gasped the first time I watched this. Uh, that really was a pleasure. Uh, some very tricky, crafty uh movie making there. I love that. On a scary scale from one to five, honestly, I would rank the first half of this movie like a three, three and a half. I thought it was very tense and very scary, but I think ultimately I would put it more at about a two and a half because you know, the tension and the jumps are only as good as the payoff. You know, you have to have that climax after all the foreplay. And there just never was any of that for me. So in the end, this the scares were very in the moment in that first half, but nothing that's going to stick in my brain really.

And so, unfortunately, if I'm playing a little game of Smash or Slash, I regret to inform you, my audience, that Relic is going to be a slash from me. Definitely go rent it, go watch it. You know, it's a slow time for new releases right now, a slow time for horror, and you know, I'm gonna take what I can get. But, you know, looking big picture, relic was not the one for me. And that also means that what's my favorite scary movie? That is unchanged. It is still Candyman. Alright, you guys, next time on What's Your Favorite Scary Movie? You may have heard on our calendar, or if you're a Patreon, on our newsletter, or I don't know how you get your information about us.

But we had been so excited to finally release the episode that Julianne and I recorded on Saint Maud back in March. But because of the pandemic and movie theaters pushing their opening dates, which I do not blame them. I think safety first, let's all be conscious of what we're doing and how we can help each other remain safe and healthy. Uh, but Saint Maud will no longer be coming to theaters on July 17th. So you will need to stay tuned for what we are covering next week on what's your favorite scary movie. And you can stay tuned at Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, Scary Movie Pod, where we will post updates on what you need to watch next weekend to be ready for our next episode.

Until we return, head on over to Apple Podcasts and leave us a rating and review. And maybe you'll hear us scream your name over the airwaves next week. My name is Parker Heron. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Parker Del Rey. Letterboxed too, if you want to know what I'm watching. Even though I'm having a little bit of trouble keeping up with my letterboxed, I would like to do better. So go follow me there, and if I have a bunch of followers, I will be more obligated to keep updating. You can also keep up with what's your favorite scary movie on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at ScarymoviePod. If you can't get enough of our content, head on over to Patreon.com slash scary moviepod, where you will get a hot newsletter at the beginning of every month and two bonus episodes on movies that sometimes our patrons choose through polls that are sequels to movies we've watched on the main podcast, are maybe originals or remakes of movies that we've watched on the main podcast.

Really, anything is fair game over there, so you don't want to miss our hot reviews over on Patreon. You can also find us at scarymoviepod.com where we have been posting reviews and of course updating our calendar, which will be of importance next week so that you know what we are watching. And finally, if you have any requests or feedback, you can always email us at scarymoviepod at gmail.com. I will miss you until next week. It has been a pleasure getting to tickle your ear holes with my vocals. See you next time. Bye.