Censor review – skin-crawling psychological horror that stays with you

“It’s fuzzy around the best bits, and someone’s taped over the ending,” warns a VHS vendor as he makes a sale of a notorious horror flick in Censor. It’s a quote you’ll be turning over in your mind for the entirety of Prano Bailey-Bond’s superb first feature, a psychological horror that forces you to trust it – and yourself – less and less the longer it goes on. The experience is not unlike being trapped in someone else’s bad dream until the mind-melting denouement finally lets you free.

Set in the days of the UK’s Thatcher-led moral panic around grisly slasher movies labelled “video nasties,” Censor follows Enid (Niamh Algar), a censor assigned to this new breed of home-release horror, advising distributors where they need to make cuts and occasionally banning a film’s release entirely. Enid is relatively lenient, able to tell the artful violence from the pointlessly cruel stuff, but her world and work are thrown into disarray by a new film where the centrepiece murder bears a deeply distressing resemblance to the childhood disappearance of Enid’s sister Nina.

Bailey-Bond conjures a crushingly oppressive atmosphere, to the point where you feel as if your mind is slipping just as rapidly as Enid’s. The censor’s offices, all winding corridors and blood-curdling screams from the videos, resemble a torture dungeon more than they do a workplace, while every exterior shot takes place in the dead of night. When you do see sunlight, it’s always obscured, shining through tiny, filthy windows. It’s a startling, grim world, one reflective of not just Enid’s mental state, but also the bleakness and hysteria that surrounded the moral panics of ‘80s Britain.

The general aesthetics of the decade are recreated with an off-putting yet immersive authenticity – this is the real, drab ‘80s, not the hyper-colourful nostalgia of most recent ‘80s-inspired movies – but Bailey-Bond only very occasionally actually dips into recreating the visual style of the video nasties themselves. When these homages do pop up, they’re by turns hypnotic and blackly funny. TV static takes on a transporting, dream-like quality, while the few grisly kills the director does allow herself are amusingly imaginative and macabre.

Censor is less interested in big, one-off scares than it is in simply keeping you in a constant state of unease, and Algar’s excellent performance is integral to this slower, more introspective approach. Alternating between tense brittleness and wide-eyed terror and disbelief, Algar has to hold our attention while spending a large percentage of the film entirely on her own, and she absolutely rises to the occasion. Even when Enid is with other people, there’s a barrier that her meeker co-workers can’t break through; loneliness abounds in Censor, people and the nation as a whole fracturing in a new era they can’t quite get their heads around.

If you go into Censor looking for the kind of throwback grindhouse of, say, Panos Cosmatos’s Mandy, you’ll likely be disappointed – the film it most resembles is in fact Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio – but if you allow its strange rhythms to wash over you, you’ll likely find yourself drowning in a skin-crawling discomfort that is rare to witness. A confident and articulate debut, this is a fantastic introduction to Prano Bailey-Bond, who seems certain to become of the new decade’s defining horror voices.

Censor is in UK cinemas from 20 August.