Review #161: Relic (2020)

This review was originally written in 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #16 - Relic (2020)

Relic follows a mother and daughter that come together after the grandmother has gone missing. She turns back up, but then begins showing signs of mental instability and seems to be going through bizarre behavioral phases. There's this weird mold growing around the house, there's a weird shadow person/thing in the background of certain scenes, and the grandmother seems to have been keeping something sinister locked behind a closet door that defies time and space.

Overall I had positive thoughts on this movie (and there was even one sequence that I REALLY loved) but much of the runtime it felt like a generic mishmash of other movies I've seen. The beginning where the mother and daughter come together to help search for the grandmother felt VERY reminiscent of the first twenty minutes of The Dark and The Wicked (which came out the same year), to the point where my wife and I both commented on it at the same time. The sequences where the grandmother is clearly having some sort of mental issues at night reminded me very strongly of the M. Night Shyamalan movie, The Visit. The resolution of the film (more on that later) felt very reminiscent of some other movie I've seen recently but can't recall which; whatever the case, it all felt like well-tread ground and ultimately I don't know if it really did much to distinguish itself.

The exception, of course, was what I'll call the "backrooms" sequence. My absolute favorite part of the film was when the daughter goes beyond the locked door and discovers it's not a closet, but a winding hallway that leads on to more and more and more rooms of the house, all cluttered and labyrinthine and inescapable- this portion of the movie was just so good, so terrifying, I would have been 100% on board for an entire movie of just that. It lasted maybe ten minutes (peppered in among the section leading up to the climax), and was undoubtedly the highlight of the movie, but at the same time felt so bizarre and out-of-place that I almost wonder if this was an idea for a different movie shoehorned into this one, or if maybe the focus for the movie shifted dramatically during production (either before or after this sequence was written)?

The thing that's the most puzzling about this movie, though, is the ending. Without saying exactly what happens, I'll just say that I did not at all understand the ending for this film, and when my wife read an explanation to me, I didn't think it fit the movie I'd seen at all. Supposedly the supernatural elements of this movie are a metaphor for hereditary mental illness, and/or Alzheimer's? I won't argue that some of the elements are there (the scenes where the grandmother's behavior is erratic isn't even a metaphor, it's right there on the page- and the "backrooms" sequence definitely makes sense under a kind of dementia-colored lens) but I just don't see how it all fits together. It instead feels like they just threw a bunch of supernatural elements together, and then decided that because they each individually might serve as a metaphor for a thing, all of them together serve as an even better metaphor for that same thing (which isn't necessarily the case). As with my supposition that the "backrooms" sequence was an early/late addition to a changing script, I similarly feel like maybe they started with the idea of the final scene(s) and wrote their way back from there, papering over any issues with the "metaphor" idea. If their intention from the beginning was for the whole movie to be a metaphor for degenerative hereditary mental illness, they took a VERY weird way to get there.

All in all this was an enjoyable film, definitely gaining some extra points for the one sequence I liked, but so much of it was forgettable that I don't know how eager I'd be to watch it again.

Overall Rating: 6/10 Delicious, Delicious Photos

IMDB Connection (Since There Was a Severe Dearth of Trivia for this Movie): The director of Relic, Natalie Erika James, worked on a previous one of my Bucket List movies- Upgrade (2018)!