Censor (2021)

I had the misfortune of watching Censor and Erik Bloomquist’s Ten Minutes to Midnight (2020) during the same week, and while I can understand the buzz around these two films based on the performances of their lead actresses, of which it is impossible to walk away from without feeling admiration, I have to say that in all other respects those two films represented the most irritating, pretentious, time wasting experiences I’ve had in a long time.

It’s the mid-eighties, and young, bookish film censor Enid (Niamh Algar) is busy snipping away at films she believes may deprave and corrupt the general public. Only for herself and fellow censor Sanderson (Nicholas Burns) to be caught up in a media storm when a film they passed uncut is linked to a copycat crime. Enid’s exposure to the output of mysterious moviemaker Frederick North (Adrian Schiller) also triggers childhood flashbacks to her sister’s disappearance and leaves Enid convinced that her now adult sister is being forced against her will into appearing in North’s notorious films. I have heard some describe Censor as a ‘love letter’ to the Video Nasties era, on the basis of which I have to question just what kind of love letters these people have been receiving over the years. Censor traps you in a succession of rooms with some of the coldest, depressing and unlikeable characters imaginable…the censors are a bunch of pen pushing, office dullards, the video nasties are depicted as fodder for sub-morons, and the people behind them predictably turn out to be one-dimensional assholes. That’s some love letter.

Censor gives the impression of being directed by the set-designer, it’s a film that gets a charge out of drawing your attention to antiquated technology- characters banging away on typewriters, listening to fax machines, writing on notepads, VHS tape dropouts, and of course VHS tapes themselves being ejected from VCR machines. Structurally it echoes Saxon Logan’s Sleepwalker (1984) in the way that the opening two thirds unfold like a talky, real world issues based Play for Today episode, only for the last third to go full on blood splattered horror. However the transition between those two, very different worlds is handled far less easily here than in the Logan film. I’m not entirely convinced the director really wanted to make a horror film at all, the whole sub-plot about the sister being abducted and reappearing years later in horror films seemed bolted on to the plot and lacking in credibility. It’s so farfetched and unbelievable that you can see the ‘twist’ about the sister coming long before it drops onscreen.

Admittedly, Censor is a work of fiction and doesn’t have to adhere to historic facts as much as a straightforward documentary, but if you are going to set your film in a specific time period and around real life events it surely has to have some basis in reality. During this period, the BBFC was run by James Ferman, a proud do-gooder and liberal, who had an openly combative relationship with film industry people who didn’t share those values…Michael Winner springs to mind. Yet in Censor, we are led to believe that the head of the BBFC would welcome a sleazy film producer into the BBFC offices like a VIP, and just weakly stand by as this guy makes inappropriate comments to a young, female censor by offering her a role in one of his upcoming movies that’ll involve her being raped and murdered onscreen. Would that really have happened on James Ferman’s watch?...C’mon. Likewise we’re meant to believe that the films banned during the Video Nasties furore weren’t predominately made in America and Europe, but were in fact shot on home soil by shadowy, underground filmmakers and directly funded by the video distributors themselves. It gives the narrative here some much needed oomph –without it Censor would just be a film full of uptight people huddled around a VCR and television taking notes- but again has no basis in reality. Were film censors ever really mobbed by the press as they left their offices like scandal hit celebrities, or considered tabloid worthy enough to also be papped in their private lives?...I think not. As I say Censor is a work of fiction and therefore some artistic license should be afforded the filmmakers, but there are way too many "that would never have happened" moments here. Even when the BBFC were under fire during this period, be it the initial video nasties furore or the Bulger/Child's Play 3 controversy, I tend to remember the interactions between the press and the BBFC being fairly dignified, press conference type affairs, and always focused on Ferman. Underling censors never fell under media scrutiny back then, as far as I remember.

The scene where Enid procures a banned horror video from a rental shop also strikes you as rather implausible. The guy behind the counter is a nervous, hyper paranoid head case who lives in fear of police raids, and yet she is able to talk him into selling her a banned cannibal movie, under the counter in a brown paper bag. This despite the fact that he has never met her before, she isn't even a member of this video shop and doesn't look like the video nasty renting type at all. Surely all that would have set the alarm bells ringing with him...and why would he sell it to her outright when he is seen to be doing a brisk trade in renting it out...and as a film censor she'd surely have a legitimate way of seeing the film for research purposes rather than risk compromising herself by resorting to illegal means. Based on ahem...'personal experiences', you usually had to do a bit of 'above counter' dealings with VHS shop people and strike up a rapport with them, before they trusted you enough to offer you 'under the counter' videos with the word cannibal in the title. I don't want to sound like one of those pedantic people who complain that an entire film was ruined for them because it was meant to be set in say… 1979 but one tiny scene has a character wearing a watch that wasn't manufactured till 1981. As a work of fiction, Censor is allowed to bend the truth a little bit. Trouble is, there is so much of that going on here that it does begin to grate after a while if you already know a bit about the subject, and risks dropping a heap of misinformation into the laps of those who don't.

For a film called Censor, it is also frustratingly on the fence about the actual subject of censorship. Enid’s views and right to censor movies goes unchallenged, the film runs with censorious ideas that exposure to violent films can trigger emotional trauma and leave a person unable to distinguish fantasy from reality. Only too then do an about turn with a revelation that exonerates Enid and Sanderson from the tabloid witchhunt and ends with a fantasy scene ridiculing the idea that the removal of Video Nasties from society would miraculously transform Britain into a smiley, happy-clappy utopia. All the contradictory messages about censorship floating around in Censor, just strengthens the belief that this film is lacking when it comes to either a strong POV or genuine insights into the subject. For my money, the final word on the frankly done-to-death topic of Video Nasties was Jake West’s documentaries Video Nasties: The Definitive Guide (2010) and Video Nasties: Draconian Days (2014). Collectively those two nailed the pre-cert era … perfecto. The emergence of this film only adds to the feeling that nothing more needed to be said…Censor merely represents the dull, middle-class gentrification of this subject.