Sundance 2020: ‘Censor’ Is An Excellent Interrogation Of The Psyche Of The Censor

There’s a certain evident subjectivity about censorship that we often ignore, but which necessarily permeates the censorship process (despite the objectivity censors attempt to portray in the defense of their ‘art’). This was infamously illustrated in 1964, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defended his standard for “what is obscene?” in Jacobellis v. Ohio by explaining:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.”

Censorship, for all its attempts to establish an ‘objective’ standard for ranking and judging content, is at its base an entirely subjective art. It’s in this context that Censor finds its grounding, seeing ugly, like ‘beauty’, in the eye of the beholder.

Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor follows a U.K. censor, Enid (an electric Niamh Algar) in the 1980’s, a dedicated soldier of the censorship movement with a dark past. Her sister, long disappeared, haunts her. At the same time, she experiences a film that brings to light long repressed memories and fears, and she approaches the mystery with the same obsession that pervades her censorship. She has to get to the bottom of the memories crawling to the surface, come metaphorical hell or high water.

The film’s aesthetic alternates between a strong realism and a softer variant of the Mandy aesthetic as Enid journeys from her daily bureaucratic routine into the increasingly surreal investigation of her sisters disappearance against the hellscape of 1980s schlock-horror. Enid’s increasingly disturbing journey proceeds to change aspect ratios and color profiles as she dives deeper into the abyss, echoing a performance by Niamh Algar that is so often muted but which always exhibits a plethora of emotion hunting for the surface to burst free. The character is muted, yes, but there’s a violence in that stubbornly body that is steadfastly resistant but which belligerently longs to break free.

At the bottom, director Bailey-Bond’s film is a stunning rebuke of the censor’s project, set in an era where the horror arts where sometimes at their most gruesome. She forces us to follow a censor who eviscerates violent horror from, it becomes clear early on, her own darkness; she knows what’s wrong ‘when she sees it’, with instincts honed from an ambiguous dark past. The censor exhibits an inability to distinguish violent fiction from truly violent fact, and this inability stems not from the violence of the art but from the internal violence in the nature of the censor, burning to destroy anything that confirms their own destructive inner nature and disguising that destruction for virtue.

Censor is a strong film, marked by a dedicated directorial vision and a stunning central performance. The cinematography is largely functional but becomes more stunning as the story evolves, and the lead performance by Algar is properly haunting. The ending will stay with you. The film seems to hinge, however, on a question: does the drive to censor emerge from the violence of the art, or from a violence in the censor’s own heart? Are censors performing a service or polarizing a society with their own undiagnosed psychoses? And if the latter is true, what do we do if the guardians of the cultural gate are in actuality the inmates guarding the cultural asylym?

Censor premiered at Sundance 2021.