I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that certain films, especially of a horrific nature, should be banned because they might inspire people to, you know, imitate the terrible things shown therein, but somehow the censors who decide on banning or cutting these films never suffer any such ill effects from them. That was partly what drew me to Censor, which is about a young woman working for the BBFC in the mid-eighties in the midst of video nasty hysteria, who proves to be… not entirely cut out for the job, shall we say; Enid has a reputation for being one of the hardest scissor-wielders, but she starts facing harrassment when a film she did pass inspires a hideous copycat crime… and the personal baggage she carries, in the form of a sister who disappeared when the two girls were young, gradually becomes heavier and heavier.
So I liked the idea of this a lot, but not so much the execution, unfortunately… director Prano Bailey-Bond opts for the non-exploitative approach this could’ve taken; this still allows for one rather amazing jump-scare and a number of kills as Enid’s sanity starts to evaporate, one of which is kind of hilarious, but on the whole it’s possibly played with a bit too much restraint, and the film is left with an overall rather dry and slightly ponderous flavour. Plus it never makes much of its particular period setting and does require a certain amount of prior knowledge. Mind you, it pulls off its climax fairly well; the lighting of the night-time filming sequence (and the variable film frame size in this scene) makes the whole thing look so good that I can almost ignore the question of why the filmmaker had a real axe on set that could actually kill someone (and does) rather than just a prop one. It’s OK. I’d still be interested in seeing what Bailey-Bond does next.
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