Enid Baines (Niamh Algar) is a diligent film censor working within the dreary smoke filled offices of the British Board of Film Classification at the height of the ‘video nasty’ controversy in 1985. When one of the horror films she is analysing provokes memories of a traumatic incident in her youth she tries to seek out the mysterious director as reality and fiction start to blur. 

Enid is haunted by the disappearance of her seven year old sister twenty years earlier and believes that her job is important to protect the public. Her tightly wound reality takes a massive jolt though when a film that she recently passed for release is blamed for a real life murder. This event and the content of another video nasty start to unravel repressed guilt and pain. 

Censor is a brilliant entry into the horror movie pantheon. It generates a tense and suffocating air through the use of horrific sound effects, a central mystery, an exceptional lead performance and a clear love of the era. Niamh Algar who was fantastic in last year’s Raised By Wolves (2020 – Year in Review – Television) and Calm With Horses is stunning here. Some of the most effective scenes are simply the camera fixated on her reaction to the violent images she is seeing as blood curdling screams emit from a television. Whilst she is able to give amazing depth of feeling to her initially uptight protagonist. 

The creators sense of era is also a huge factor in the films success. Whilst the sets and costumes are superb some technical wizardry goes a huge way to setting the time and place and framing the real and fictional aspects of the story. The film opens with a historic Film Four logo setting a point in time whilst events in the real world are framed in widescreen and video nasties viewed in classic VHS 4:3 aspect ratio. This is something used to brilliant effect in the later stages of the story. The film was also shot on a mixture of 35mm, Super8 and VHS film stock in order to recreate the grainy imagery of the videos of the era, whilst tape crackles and glitches are incorporated as well. 

Co-writer and director Prano Bailey-Bond has crafted a debut film that firmly marks her as one to watch whilst Niamh Algar confirms her status as a rising star.