The first time it happened, someone had snuck into my grandma's apartment and hit her from behind and when she was taken to the hospital, the doctors told us she had had a mini-stroke. But she wouldn't believe it. For weeks, she said someone was coming into her apartment. Opening doors. Rearranging things. And when she slowly transitioned to an assisted living home, it was the nurses. Sneaking in. Stealing things. Moving things around.

Dementia is a terrifying and heartbreaking experience for an outsider. At the time I couldn't even fathom what my father, her son, was experiencing, seeing his mother be surprisingly lucid one minute and then stare at us like she was filled with an empty darkness the next. At the time I couldn't understand.

...At the time.

Relic introduces the elderly Edna (Robyn Nevin) as she stands, naked in her living room, staring intensely at a lit Christmas tree. On the second floor, the bathtub overflows, sending cascading water down the stairs while the tub upstairs overflows, cascading water down the stairs until it’s pooling around her feet. It’s a creepy moment made more ominous as, with a slow pan of the camera, we see what we thought was a shadow in the chair standup.

Sometime after this cold open, Edna has gone missing and so her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and her daughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) travel from Melbourne to search for her. What they find is Edna’s empty house, but everything seems a bit off. Kay first notices that a particular chair has been turned. Rotten fruit sits on the kitchen counter, ignored for quite some time. Sticky notes dot the various furniture instructing to “flush” and “turn off the tap” and “take your pills.” Later, Sam will find one in her grandmother’s sweater pocket that simply says:

Don’t follow it.

As Sam explores her grandmother’s house, she hears weird noises, like something skittering in the walls. The sound of something heavy being dragged. That’s when she discovers the closet that’s deadbolted from the outside. And when she slides the bolts open and enters, the room gives off a forbidding vibe and the plastic-wrapped clothes move in some unknown breeze...when combined with the score by Brian Reitzell and the sound design, it looks like it’s breathing. Pushing away the garments, she notices black rot festering in the wall.

That night, Kay dreams of a log cabin with an old man sitting on the decrepit bed, facing away. He falls over the side of the bed and we’re forced to look at this rotten face; a desiccated carcass...and then his eye twitches to look at us.

The next morning, Edna shows up in the kitchen, making tea. When she sees Kay and Sam, she smiles, offers tea and acts like it’s not weird that she’s standing with dirty, bare feet in the kitchen.

Co-written by Christian White and Natalie James (also the director), Relic is a masterpiece of tension and omnipresent dread. It is so assured and well-crafted that it should be discussed alongside Get Out, The Witch and Hereditary as an equally masterful debut.

Not that it should be a surprise. You can see the authenticity in her previous work, from her music video of “Mine” to her short film Drum Wave. All of her short fiction has the same attention to detail and melancholic touches you see see employed in Relic that it seems inevitable she’d turn out a truly audacious and terrifying film. Relic embraces the slow burn; the kind that gets under your skin and doesn’t allow jump scares to cut the tension. Dread and that creeping sense of inevitability puts your stomach in knots and the filmmakers resist using cheap jump scares to cut the tension. Instead, it uses shadows and imperceptible movement to craft genuinely thrilling sequences of terror.

It keeps agitating, to the point that you desperately want that jump scare. Something to cut the tension. Adding to the tension is the sound designers and the composer, who craft a rich, nightmarish soundscape that mixes traditional music with more rhythmic, real world sounds. It creates a scenario in which music and sound is married in the same way that industrial artists operate to create an oppressive sense of dread. As the film enters the third act and adds a new dimension to the horror, Natalie and her crew introduce new kinds of terror to flip the script and unsettle in completely different ways.

As the horror genre continues to mature, the way it tackles mental illness has also matured. Historically, mental illness has been used as the vehicle for horror; something that creates horror, such as the way Dissociative Identity Disorder was used in Psycho or Identity, for example. Or the way Michael Myers suffered from schizophrenia, it’s the illness that causes the horror as a literal translation of it.

Recently, though, we’ve seen a number of horror films tackle mental illness in an inverse way. Instead of illness being the cause of horror, we’re seeing horror used as the metaphor to explore the way mental illness can affect people. From the way Hereditary explores generational trauma with a possession narrative to the way The Babadook employed its monster as a representation of depression and grief, we're seeing horror used as the metaphor, rather than being the literal outcome of someone’s illness. It sidesteps exploitation and instead reveals human truths and universal fears in ways only genre films can.

Relic continues this trend by using a haunted house narrative to examine how dementia can almost hollow out a person and make them into an unfamiliar, sometimes terrifying, simulacrum of the person we once knew and loved.

I remember the first time my grandmother looked at me with vacant eyes and the horrific realization that the person looking at me had no recollection of who I was. I remember the first time she randomly and viciously used a slur to describe a waitress and then, minutes later, was back to her jovial self. It’s terrifying to witness. It’s heartbreaking to live through. Relic captures these moments with such emotional authenticity that I broke down crying both times I watched it.

It’s rare that a film can set you on edge with moments of abject terror and unrelenting dread before reducing you to a quivering ball of snot and tears by the end. But Relic did this the same way The Orphanage did over a decade ago. It poignantly strips away the outer layer to reveal the empty darkness within. And then it asks you to look. Not because it’s terrifying, though it is. But because it’s human. As uncomfortable as it is to watch, it forces you to remember that there’s still a person inside.

And they deserve love.