Relic: An Existential Nightmare of Grief And Guilt
A special piece on Natalie Erika James’ new film Relic, by Phil Nobile Jr.
What I didn’t know about hospice care, before I had to know about hospice care, is that at a certain point the plan is to actually help things along, to stop administering life-sustaining treatment. Your mom (or your grandma, or my sister) is sedated and kept, you’re told, out of pain. But they’re given no food, no water, no supplied oxygen. They’re mercifully free of the tubes and wires they’d been tethered to when living was still a slim hope, but the absence of those things mean one thing: we’ve all agreed this person should go ahead and die. You’re not quite the ferryman on the River Styx, but you’re at the very least a ship’s steward, facilitating passage and keeping things moving along. It’s a horrible feeling, conspiratorial and dirty, no matter the reality that they can’t be saved, no matter any higher-minded goals about quality of life. You have made the decision to let them die, and now you sit in the room, in a twilight zone between responsibility and penance, waiting for this strange grey husk that only sort of looks like someone you know to stop breathing.
And no one tells you about the sheer guilt felt by simply acknowledging that it’s over for this person. The helplessness of the situation will at some point manifest as a sensation that you’re not doing it correctly. We’ve seen the movies; everyone knows that superior care -- maybe even an 11th-hour miracle cure! -- is just one sharply-worded remark away, waiting to be fired like an arrow into the heart of some hospital bureaucrat who’ll be moved to action. You know the perfect emotional monologue will heal decades-old rifts between you and the dying, bringing about this mythical “closure” you always see on TV. But instead you sit there, not saying those perfect words, or any words, and rescue and healing and closure are nowhere to be seen. This profound experience, of being the guardian to the end of this person’s life, ends up being one last way you can let them down. This moment is a test, and you’re failing it.
No straight dramatic film has ever made me feel that experience the way Natalie Erika James’ Relic did. Navigating the way dementia and dying reverberates through three generations of women, James (and co-writer Christian White) explore an emotional truth that turns a J-horror-influenced plot into something altogether more immediate. Consider the spectrum of emotions that come with slowly losing someone: fear, outright terror, catharsis, release. Of course end-of-life care is fertile ground for a horror film. Of course! Presented with a gem like Relic, we shouldn’t be wondering how someone has made such an effective horror film out of this scenario; we should be wondering why it took so long for someone to do it this well.
In Relic, Edna (Robyn Nevin), a senior who lives alone in rural Australia, has gone missing. It’s the banal nightmare scenario of anyone whose parent lives alone with dementia: your able-bodied but increasingly erratic mom gets confused while running an errand and fails to return home, and you brace yourself for the worst possible outcome. But for Edna’s daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer), there’s a matter-of-factness to it all. She knows a bad end is coming for her mother, and its inevitability has at this point calloused her into a kind of detached pragmatism, a surrender to the fact that this relationship is past any meaningful resolution. Kay’s test is here, and she knows at the outset that a happy result is out of the question.
When Edna turns back up in her kitchen in the middle of the night, there’s relief -- especially from her beloved granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcoate) -- but her reappearance also presents a new burden: Kay must now figure out what to do with her mother, whose diminishing faculties mean she can no longer care for herself, and who seems to be slipping in and out of lucidity, fearful and possibly delusional that some unnameable evil has gotten into the house.
But something has gotten into the house, and that’s where Relic checks its horror boxes with an effective slow burn. We see what Edna sees, though Kay and Sam do not: something moving in the shadows of a room, a figure shifting under the bed, something a lot more human-shaped than the black mold that’s slowly overtaking the place. These quietly chilling moments are expertly rendered, but the bigger feat is how director James fearlessly eschews over-exposition in order to lean harder on the metaphor. James keeps a literal explanation for the genre elements out of reach, confident that the symbolism of creeping mold, a shadowy presence, and a once-familiar house morphing into something utterly uncooperative will do the trick. More impressively, she takes what are otherwise wholly relatable snapshots of dementia -- confused outbursts, a faucet left running, an old woman talking to herself -- and repurposes them into moments of genuine dread.
Where Relic gets outright audacious is its willingness to dial back the overt horror for the sake of emotional authenticity. Horror is, of course, a natural place to explore the emotions that come with grief, but the guilt and duty that so often accompany that grief are infrequently mined. In The Exorcist, Father Karras’ anguish over his mother’s undignified death sends him seeking any sign that someone’s actually driving this bus. Amelia’s combination of survivor’s guilt and suppressed rage in The Babadook conjure up her own demon out of the shadows, and fuel her resolve to face that demon. But the way in which a family’s hopeless sense of duty takes narrative priority here is possibly unprecedented. Edna is becoming something else, and Kay and Sam are frustrated, angry, grief-stricken; scared. But they stay, bound by blood to see it through to the end, to be in the room when their loved one crosses over. These emotions map to both the literal and interpretive reading of the film, and in pulling that off James has delivered perhaps the most authentic emotional portrayal of grief the genre has ever seen.
Like David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Relic wonders aloud: when does a person who’s slowly changing bit by bit (whether via addition or subtraction) cease to be that person? Cronenberg’s question was more of a clinical, first-person pondering. In Relic, the question is instead asked of those who love that person, with an addendum: if this is no longer the person I love, what now is my responsibility to this being, and what do I do with all the emotions that are tied to this individual? James’ response is a beautiful one, devastating in its universality. As we watch three generations of women come together, laying down their respective concerns, burdens, and resentments to do what a family is meant to at the end of life, we recognize we’ve all either been there, or will be.