[Sundance 2021 Review] Censor Explores How Covering Up Trauma Doesn't Erase It

The 80s were a wild time of conservative censorship the likes of which Western culture hasn’t truly experienced since. Sure, there was the moral panic of the 90s over video games that resulted in a rating system and places outside of the UK and North America still have some draconian rules. But the moral furor that movies, comics and roleplaying games would incite violence, lead children to commit terrible atrocities and basically cause anarchy in the streets was at its zenith. In the UK, this rise in conservatism and censorship in the 80s also created the rise of the so-called Video Nasties, films deemed inappropriate for British society. It’s also the time and place where Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor is set.

Enid (Niamh Algar) is the titular censor, working for some unnamed (read: British Board of FIlm Classification) organization that classifies and censors films. She’s introduced watching a film in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio and filled with nostaligic bisexual lighting where a young woman screams and is dragged to her...well, before we can figure out where, Enid pauses the video. Then she rewinds to watch it again, taking notes. “If we’re passing it as an 18 (rating), it needs more cuts,” she says, complaining that the eye-gouging is too realistic. Her coworker tries to reason that the eye-gouging sequence is a literary tradition, dating back to The Odyssey and The Cyclops, but Enid isn’t having it.

“We can’t afford to make mistakes. I’m cutting it.”

For Enid, these horror films aren’t entertainment and her job isn’t just to censor and cut out objectionable content. She does what she does to protect people, in her words. And her words are bolstered by inter-credits cuts of news reporters and politicians touting the horrors that would befall polite British society (and don’t forget the children) if these horrific movies were to be allowed in the UK. Outside of work, Enid lives a solitary life, haunted by the disappearance of her sister twenty years before. Enid was with her at the time but trauma has blocked exactly what happened and her disappearance has remained a mystery ever since. And while Enid’s parents have been ready to move on and declare their daughter deceased, Enid isn’t able to give up.

These feelings are further awakened when she watches a new video nasty called Don’t Go in the Church, directed by a mysterious and prolific horror director named Frederick North (Adrian Schiller). In it, two young girls go into the woods where evil things happen and the images on that tape trigger bursts of memories of the fateful night when Nina went missing. So much so that Enid becomes convinced that the director has made a movie of her trauma. As the thought continues to spin in her head, she becomes convinced that North and his producer Doug Smart (Michael Smiley) know what happened to her sister years before. 

Co-written (with Anthony Fletcher) and directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, Censor manages to fully exemplify a decade of filmmaking without devolving to the typical pastiche tropes. As Enid trudges through the claustrophobic subway tunnels, the film evokes Possession’s windy subways and the 4:3 aspect schlocky films the censors watch bring to mind films like The Driller Killer and Evil Dead. This subtle world building gives us a sense of time and location and while we might look back at this period with a shake of our head, Censor does a fine job of explaining the presumed “stakes” at play.

Early on, a news report comes in that a film that Enid and a coworker passed for rating is being implicated in a murder that replicates some of the violence in the films. Even in a time before the internet, Enid receives threatening calls (“you should be ashamed of yourself!”) and the front page headline proclaims “Censors to blame?” Regardless of the merits of censorship, the paranoia of the 80s created an almost Orweillian totalitarianism in reference to horror films. 

It’s this idea of censorship that I found the most interesting aspect of Censor because while you could easily write this off as another movie about a woman going mad, it’s not actually about the character. We know very little about Enid, a character who exists mostly at work and doesn’t have a life outside of her job. She’s almost a non-character. Instead, she becomes a cypher to explore the way society focuses on the wrong solutions to fix problems. Her rather bland trauma reflects the horror living in the world and her job represents the ill-fated ways society tries to deal with that trauma.

At one point, director Frederick North defends his movies by saying, “people think I create the horror. But I don’t. Horror is already out there, in all of us.” This line is another reference to the famous quotation from Wes Craven about horror films: “Horror films don't create fear. They release it.” Enid censors the violence in films the say way she’s censored the horrific event that happened in her childhood; but like the gore that’s been cut from films, it doesn’t cease to exist in the real world. It actually helps hide it, much in the same way Enid has hidden deep secrets in the back of her psyche. 

Ultimately, Censor works because it explores how society wants to edit out the parts it deems grotesque by using Enid’s traumatic past as a cipher. The result is just as disastrous, bloody and red-filled as Enid’s descent into madness. It shows that cutting out the unsavory content doesn’t actually protect anyone. It actually allows that trauma and horror to fester like an infected boil.