Censor

Set during the "video nasty" era of the early 1980s, Prano Bailey-Bond's feature debut is an ambitious meta horror film that dabbles in Lynchian unease. Buttoned-up film censor Enid (Niamh Algar) spends her days immersed in ultra-violent movies, inhabiting an oppressive world of smoky screening rooms and Kafkaesque offices. When she glimpses her long-lost sister in a low-budget film, can she trust what she's seeing? As reality starts to fracture, Bailey-Bond borrows tricks from genre classics such as Videodrome (1983) and Suspiria (1977) in order to show Enid's fevered imaginings bleeding into the films she watches. Taken simply as a re-creation of the VHS era, this is an impressive achievement, but as the film progresses there are underdeveloped allegorical points that make it harder to identify with Enid's plight.