SUNDANCE ’20 REVIEW

SUNDANCE 2020: ‘RELIC’ and the True Horror of Senility

Name: Relic review
Item: Relic
Rating: 4
Author: Matt Oakes

By Matt Oakes · January 30, 2020

SUNDANCE 2020: ‘RELIC’ and the True Horror of Senility

Where to watch: Streaming on AMC+ and Shudder, free on Kanopy, or rent or buy on digital (updated October 2026)Watch on Shudder · Watch on Kanopy · Rent or buy on Amazon · Buy on Blu-ray/4KAs an Amazon Associate, Silver Screen Riot earns from qualifying purchases.

Relic, an old-folks-being-creepy offshoot of midnight squirmer, explores the true-to-life horrors of a matriarch’s deteriorating mental state. Dementia is scary enough before you add in family curses, labyrinthine structures, and ghouls under the bed and in her impressive debut, director Natalie Erika James filters her own traumatic experience confronting her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s through the prism of horror cinema, allowing for an emotionally rich and impressively eerie slice of dramatic horror that speaks to real-life terrors.

In economy, Relic relishes and James whittles the ingredients of her story down to their most basic, nuanced form. There’s only three characters populating the feature: A grandmother, Edna (Robyn Nevin); a mother, Kay (Emily Mortimer); and a daughter, Sam (Bella Heathcote) and the script from James and Christian White complicates the dynamic with implied unpleasant histories without severing that deep-rooted unbreakable bond of family.

When Kay and Sam go to visit Edna, they find her home empty. Her car still in the driveway, Edna has seemingly disappeared off the face of the Earth. After arranging a search party with local police, Kay and Sam fear the worst. But Edna reappears a few days later, bruised, dirtied and in a daze. Not particularly clued into the severity of her absenteeism, she brushes it off with a faint, “Don’t worry about me.” As any concerned daughter would, Kay seeks out alternative living arrangements – including the dreaded nursing facility – before realizing that something far more sinister might have taken hold of her mother.

▶ Streaming free on Kanopy. More picks: The Best Free Modern Horror Movies on Kanopy Right Now →

Produced by the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal and the Russo Brothers (Avengers: Endgame) there is supreme confidence to Relic, particularly for a first-time filmmaker, a confidence born of faith in a female storyteller and the wisdom to let her story bloom from that feminine perspective. James nails the emotionality of the piece, the tiptoe-then-sprint pacing that forces heart rates to spike at just the right time, and the fine-tuned generational performances that give the film such texture. All horror movies worth their salt are about more than just scares and James succeeds in using genre to prove the very-real heartbreak of watching your parents lose their minds to the onslaught of time and how different generations of a family deal with this tragedy in different ways.

Another absolutely critical ingredient for the stock of all solid horror films is the principal casting and with horror’s cultural and artistic worth climbing year after year, we’re left with many a peak performance hidden amongst horror. Squirreled away in a genre that was not taken seriously not-too-long ago, horror has become a bastion for great female performances (at the risk of sounding like a broken record, here’s where I’ll state that Lupita Nyong’o and Toni Collette gave two of the best performances of the year few years, in Us and Hereditary respectively) and James film gives us yet another known entity stretching out into the genre.

Relic relishes having Emily Mortimer in the pole position and uses her skillful command over the screen to leg up the competition. Mortimer is unsurprisingly great, giving a turn that ripples with devastation, but so too are Nevin and Heathcote, Relic using standout performances to explore the generational divide between the triptych of women, in addition to scaring the bejesus out of us when the time comes. And if there’s one thing that Relic is sure to emphasize, it’s that time always comes for us.

CONCLUSION: The clever, strange and emotionally-satisfying first film from director Natalie Erika James uses horror to get at the heartache of senility. Emily Mortimer gives an anguished performance as a tormented daughter and mother as ‘Relic’ burrows under its audiences’ skin through an earnest, emotional approach to genre filmmaking.