[Editor’s Note: The following article contains Major spoilers for the end of “Relic.”]
While haunted house films have historically been the realm of male directors, the home is traditionally women’s territory. The haunted house movie has always been about family trauma, dilemma, and emotional stress, usually from from the perspective of a woman lead or matriarch. It only feels right to have such themes in the hands of a woman director, and “Relic” director Natalie Erika James has the genre chops to back it up. Recent auteur horror has succeeded by employing the form to explore mental illness (“The Babadook”), inherited trauma (“Hereditary”), and domestic violence (“The Invisible Man”). In “Relic,” James applies a grotesquely intimate lens on the horrors of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
For the Japanese-Australian filmmaker, the subject of her first feature was intensely personal.
“My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and a lot of the film came from observation in her relationship with my mother changing over time,” James said in a phone interview.
While haunted house films have historically been the realm of male directors, the home is traditionally women’s territory. The haunted house movie has always been about family trauma, dilemma, and emotional stress, usually from from the perspective of a woman lead or matriarch. It only feels right to have such themes in the hands of a woman director, and “Relic” director Natalie Erika James has the genre chops to back it up. Recent auteur horror has succeeded by employing the form to explore mental illness (“The Babadook”), inherited trauma (“Hereditary”), and domestic violence (“The Invisible Man”). In “Relic,” James applies a grotesquely intimate lens on the horrors of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
For the Japanese-Australian filmmaker, the subject of her first feature was intensely personal.
“My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and a lot of the film came from observation in her relationship with my mother changing over time,” James said in a phone interview.
- 7/11/2020
- by Jude Dry
- Indiewire
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