| IFC Midnight | Release Date (Streaming): July 10, 2020 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
37
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
The PlaylistJul 7, 2020
James often frames her characters in close-ups with still backgrounds and lingers there for far too long, creating a transfixing atmosphere of discomfort. Through all her aesthetic craft, the house transforms into a physical manifestation of dementia with forgotten rooms, claustrophobic spaces, and walls that slowly close in on each other.
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Jul 21, 2020
IndieWireJul 9, 2020
Relic exists firmly in the realm of allegory, and if you’re looking for answers to the film’s spooky ambiguities and uncanny set pieces, you won’t find them. James is more concerned with creating an atmospheric rumination on intergenerational trauma, death, and dying that also happens to be a striking horror movie.
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Jul 30, 2020
James makes some confident decisions in the film’s last act, showing a welcome trust in the audience, particularly for a debut feature. She also gets fascinating performances out of her actors — each does a lot with a little. The performances aren’t as muted as they are quietly, intensely focused.
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Jul 11, 2020
If the setup feels quotidian, the tension still climbs steadily, egged on by Edna's increasing confusion and cognitive decline and Kay and Sam's conflicting ideas of what should be done about it. But it's the final scene, it turns out, that James has saved her chips for: a haunting tableau both gruesome and beautiful and somehow, full of love.
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Jul 7, 2020
Just to re-emphasize, Relic is not a documentary about dementia, or a medically accurate look at the disease in the way that films such as “Away from Her” with Julie Christie or “Still Alice” with Julianne Moore were. It is a film that springs from the id, from deep-seated fear of a disease we don’t fully understand.
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Jul 6, 2020
The kind of dread-infused slow burn that’s very much in vogue at the moment, Relic is so entirely, transparently, even explicitly about the horror of dementia and losing a loved one to it that the more traditional genre elements—like a potential supernatural presence in the house—feel rather redundant, maybe even unnecessary.
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Jul 11, 2020
What makes this movie so frustrating is that it ends on an intriguing message about what we inherit, what we’re bound to through our families. But without the heft of sincere horror behind it, Relic falls short of its potential and we’re left wondering how terrifying this message actually is.
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Aug 6, 2020
It’s a horror movie that delays the big scares, foregoes a clean pursuit of answers, and instead piles on details that may or may not “mean” anything. They appear onscreen with a saggy and somewhat overburdened sense of psychological import, pointing toward the broader implications of what’s at play here: a matriarch’s possible dementia, for example. What they really evoke is the richer, more involved and chilling story this movie seems to want to be.
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