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Censor

3/10

Stars: Niamh Algar, Michael Smiley, Nicholas Burns, Clare Holman, Sophia La Porta, Vincent Franklin, Adrian Schiller

Director: Prano Bailey-Bond

Here's a horror movie, set in the 1980s, that, after a promising start, goes nowhere and does it slowly, tending to glorify the video nasties it surely seeks to condemn.

Enid (Algar from TV's Deceit) is a young woman in her early thirties, working as one of a board of film censors, who finds herself unexpectedly and unwantedly in the limelight when one of the horror films she and a colleague passed (with cuts) is held responsible for an 'amnesiac killer' butchering his wife and eating her face.

At the same time Enid is haunted by the woodland disappearance of her younger sister, especially now that her parents have, 25 years on, had their daughter officially declared dead.

Besieged by the Press, still blaming herself for her sister's presumed fate, and believing the heroine (La Porta) of a video-nasty series to be the missing girl, the fragile Enid's mind begins to crumble.

The last reel gives us the expected bloodsoaked slaughterhouse, but no real closure. The promising Algar is by far the best of a cast who, under Bailey-Bond's pawky direction, somehow seem under-rehearsed.

David Quinlan

UK (Wales) 2020. UK Distributor: Vertigo. Technicolor.
83 minutes. Partly widescreen. UK certificate: 18.

Guidance ratings (out of 3): Sex/nudity 1, Violence/Horror 3, Drugs 0, Swearing 2.

Review date: 17 Aug 2021