Toward the end of her life, my grandmother developed
dementia after having suffered a then-undetected series of mini-strokes while living alone in her Philly row home of many decades. She
was someone I’d always known to be fierce, strong, and stubborn (I come from an
Italian family, so no surprise there); she was also someone for whom the
expression “suffered no fools” was coined. Her bullshit detector was well-oiled
and frequently maintained, and though she treated her grandchildren with great
care, if you were anyone else – look out. Because of this, she loomed large in
my childhood mind and I always took for granted that she’d remain a towering,
untoppable figure until her end…but after silently growing old in the home
where she raised my father and uncle, a home which she refused to abandon in
that stubborn elderly-person way, she was finally carried out against her will –
literally, as she sat in an armchair, like she was an Egyptian queen – after
suffering a fall caused by her stroke. In spite of her profane promises, she’d
never see her home of sixty-plus years again. Like many other poor souls, she
lived out her final days in an assisted living facility, where she wasted away
into a crooked mass of bones and thinning white hair until she no longer resembled
who she was.
The last two times I saw her offered two polar extremes on
what dementia can do to a person; it was my first time witnessing how someone can
be abandoned by their own retreating mind and realizing how little in control
we are of our own ends.
Being that my father maintained routine visits, her memory and
knowledge of him was always fresh and available. But me…she didn’t know. Not at
first.
“You remember Joey?” he asked her, motioning to me after we
entered her room during my first visit.
From her oversized bed where she looked like a shrunken
doll, she nodded at me politely but indifferently and said, “Hi, Jerry.”
My father, by now well used to her fleeting mind, softly
laughed and said, “Not Jerry, Mom. Joey…your
grandson.”
She looked at me again, confused and wary, like a trick was
being played on her…but then her recognition of me kicked in and every corner
of her face changed. She softened. A smile of remembrance and love replaced her
tight-lipped expression of forced civility. Within a few seconds, she looked
and felt like an entirely different person – the person I’d known since I was
old enough to know anyone at all.
“Hi, Joey,” she said in a quivering voice, her smile growing
wider, and the miseries of her life and her new depressing environment were
entirely gone. I sat down next to her bed, took her hand, and we talked. The
specifics of what we talked about have faded since that day, but I seem to
recall her saying she was looking forward to getting out of that place and
going back home, just as soon as she was better.
As awful as her eventual ending was, I wish this had been our last time meeting.
I went to see her again later on, but this time by myself. My
father had warned me ahead of time that, without him next to me, she might not
know who I was. I understood this, but reasoned I had to try; she obviously
didn’t have much time left, and if the choice was to either see her or not see her, it didn’t seem like much of
a choice at all.
She wasn’t in her room this time; she was sitting alone in
her wheelchair in the common area. I sat down next to her, but she didn’t
acknowledge me. Finally, I said, “Hi, Grandmom.”
She looked at me with cool, dismissive eyes.
“…What?” she responded,
like I was some random solicitor at her door pretending to know her while selling
her something she couldn’t have needed less. It was evident she didn’t know who
I was, and after looking at me for a second, she looked straight ahead again.
“It’s Joey,” I told her. “Your grandson.”
“My what?” she
asked harshly. “What are you talking about? I don’t know what you’re talking
about.”
I tried every association I could think of. My father – I
was his son. My uncle – I was his nephew. I said their names over and over, and
though she remembered them, her memory of me had been lost. It was a situation
I didn’t know how to navigate, and even though I knew this was a possibility, I
didn’t come prepared for the event it actually happened. The more I tried to
engage her, the more I realized she suspected I was facility personnel, and
once that idea settled into her mind, instead of my being some random stranger,
her demeanor warmed a bit, so I remained with her and talked in general terms
for a few more minutes. I asked if the staff were treating her nicely, and if
she was comfortable, to which she offered noncommittal responses. I soon ran
out of things to say, so we sat in silence for a bit before I stood up to leave.
The last thing I ever said to her was, “I’ll come back to see you again real
soon, okay?”
She shrugged at me, like this were no big thing, because why
should she care if some anonymous staff member whom she didn’t know ever saw
her again? “Okay…” she muttered, as if I were offering her irrelevant
information she’d never need to know, as if she were telling me, “You can go
now, whoever you are.”
I nearly ran out of the place – like I’d done something
wrong and an orderly would be chasing me down any moment. I left feeling like
an emotional catastrophe. I felt terrible for her because this was going to be
how she ended. I felt irrationally embarrassed and hurt because she didn’t know
who I was. And I felt afraid because I couldn’t help but wonder if this
miserable fate would eventually befall my own parents, and all the people I
ever loved, and then me. She passed away not much longer after that, and I realized
with sadness and shame that my last ever interaction with her involved me
pretending to be someone else just so she would talk to me.
John Carpenter once said that fear is the most universal
emotion we have – that we’re born afraid, we die afraid, and in between, we’re
all afraid of the same things. We can be afraid of the mythological:
werewolves, vampires, and other monsters; the philosophical: ghosts and demons
and the darkness inside us all; and the scientific: aliens, bad biology,
species long thought extinct, and a planet rebelling against us for having
treated it so poorly. As vicious or scary as any of those concepts and cryptids
might be, we always have that safety net of fiction keeping us at arm’s length
from terror’s implications. Sure, even the most fantastical titles can be used
as parallels for real-world horror, which is what the genre does best – you can
be just as afraid of George Romero’s zombies as an old spooky house as Jason
Voorhees cutting your midsection off with a pole saw. Subterranean sand worms,
Maryland witches, mirror-dwelling ghosts, telekinetic misfits – you have no
choice but to pick your poison. But ultimately, every single horror movie ever
made was about the same thing: our innate fear of death, in what form it will
come, and through what avenue our lives led us to such an ending. Will our
deaths be quick and peaceful, or drawn out and painful? Will the last thing we
ever see be a familiar face by our bedside, or the back of the nurse as she
updates our file on a hospital computer? Will we feel someone’s warm hand in
ours, or nothing but cold air? Will we still know who we are when the time comes, or will our minds be trapped
inside a darkened room that no longer feels familiar to us?
This year’s Relic,
directed by Natalie Erika James, is perhaps one of the most terrifying films
you could ever see – not because it’s
the kind of horror experience that shares shocking, boundary-pushing imagery like
a Hereditary or presents something
more epically-scoped like a Night of the
Living Dead – but because it’s one of those rare films where the real-life
horror informs the cinematic one, as
opposed to the opposite. Night of the Living
Dead or Invasion of the Body
Snatchers were blank slates – their roving mass threats could embody
whatever real-life horror you wanted. Romero said Night of the Living Dead was about one culture devouring another
and changing everything. The original Invasion
of the Body Snatchers was an allegory for communism, while the 1978 remake
was about the various revolutions American citizens were taking part in at that
time: protesting the Vietnam War, decrying the corruption of the Nixon White
House, cheering on sexual liberation – rejecting the machine that was turning
everyone into soulless automatons who wouldn’t question authority. Relic isn’t front-facingly about
something while secretly being about something else. It is very much about the horrors of slowly losing a loved one to
dementia, and how that horror can escape the brain it’s already infected and
leak out onto those forced to act as the caregiver. It can twist relationships,
warp the very home in which you live, and reinvent a person you’ve known and
loved for so long that they are no longer someone you recognize or understand,
mutating them into something monstrous and villainous and a sobering portent of
things possibly to come. And you can either fight, rebel, and flee from this
monster, or embrace it, because you know, deep down, that person you’ve always
known is still there, and you will never be able to change what is.
Kay (Emily Mortimer, Shutter
Island) and her somewhat estranged daughter, Sammy (Bella Heathcote, Neon Demon) are heading to Kay’s
mother’s isolated home in the middle of the Australian woods. Edna (Robyn Nevin,
The Matrix sequels), prone to
forgetfulness from an encroaching mental illness, has been missing for a few
days, so Kay and Sammy examine the house, speak to authorities, and walk the
woods, with no sign of her…that is until she comes home in the middle of the
night while Kay and Sammy are asleep; her feet are dirty, she’s spacier than
usual, and she’s not talking about where she’s been, but otherwise she seems physically fine. As time goes on, what Kay
assumes to be a rapidly deteriorating mind turns out to be much more terrifying,
and as a black mold begins to overtake Edna’s house, in the same way a black
nothingness overtakes her mind, Kay is forced to navigate caring for a parent
with dementia while also contending with the strange and potentially paranormal
presence transforming the very home in which all three generations are
currently living.
Considering its own trailer seems to have been heavily
inspired by that of Hereditary,
while also showing off familiar “Boo!” imagery from the likes of The Conjuring, you might be surprised
by what Relic offers. That’s not to
say Relic isn’t scary, or even a
horror film – it’s both – but it moves at a purposely slow place, revealing
pieces of the mystery a little at a time, or sometimes showing you potential pieces of the puzzle, leaving
the viewer to put it all together. If you come looking for quick-paced,
mainstream horror, Relic will fight
you at every turn, but if you’re a patient viewer who enjoys a good mystery, Relic will not only prove a satisfying spin
on the haunted house story, but will hit you hard in the feels with its
intensely emotional finale – and it’s all due to the realistically flawed
characters.
Early on, in spite of Kay’s worry, it’s easy for the viewer
to see her as uncaring and unconcerned – not because of any action she fails to
take, but because of her ambivalent reaction to her mother’s odd behavior. We,
the audience, know from the start that something unnatural is unfolding, and
Mortimer willingly and bravely takes on the role of a hands-off daughter,
risking the audience’s aversion to her. In reality, Kay’s sins aren’t
outlandish or unique to anyone who has ever been in that situation. She’s the
first to admit she could’ve been around more, and maybe she should’ve been, but
she spends the entire film contending with this and refusing the “easier”
resolutions to Edna’s growing mental instability, eventually visiting a
“five-star living” retirement home but later crying in the parking lot because
she knows she doesn’t have the heart to follow through. During the first act, it’s
revealed that Kay’s great grandfather had suffered a similar malady and died in
total isolation on the family’s property, so when she says, “His mind wasn’t
all there in the end…I don’t think he was cared for like he should’ve been,”
that’s the crux of the film’s conflict and what has to be overcome.
The character of Sammy closely parallels the audience;
because of her presumed estrangement with her mother, whom she calls by her
first name, her sympathies lie with her grandmother by default, assuming her to
be the victim of an impatient daughter unwilling to reconcile Edna’s wayward
mind and her need for independence. In a way, Sammy represents idealistic
ignorance – someone young and lacking real-world experience of how shitty life
can be, someone who is burdened only with the knowledge of what’s going on, but
without the full scope of its implications. During a sweet moment with her
grandmother, Sammy offers to move into the house permanently to help her with
every day tasks; within minutes, however, following a nasty confrontation
directly caused by Edna’s illness, Sammy gets her first taste of how life would
be as Edna’s caregiver. Suddenly, things don’t seem so easy.
Nevin brings Edna to life in equally horrifying and
heartbreaking ways. There are very few moments where Edna is lucid and
seemingly the way she used to be, though she never shares any of these moments
with Kay. Their relationship is tense and worsens throughout the film, with
Edna only softening during the scenes where she tries to convince Kay that
someone or something is coming after her. Relic
packs these emotional punches several times, offering the viewer a full view of
how wrenching this kind of existence can be. Edna is consistently presented as
both the villain and the victim,
never comfortably resting on one side versus the other – and when dealing with
something like a mental illness, this hews close to reality when relating it to
an outsider’s perception. Edna’s increasingly dangerous behavior isn’t a result
of anything more than bad biological luck, and the emotional toll it takes on
those around her results in perhaps irrational but completely understandable
fear, anger, and frustration. It’s easy for someone in Kay’s position to fear
someone who was once a mother but now acts like a complete stranger, to grow
angry at her for “allowing” this transformation to take place, and to grow
frustrated at many, many things: her mother’s wandering mind, the brutal life
cycle that enables this kind of misery, and herself for not being as present as
she could’ve been. Kay is railing against life itself, and why it's filled with so much hardship and heartache, but she's also railing against her own fate...at least until she comes to accept it. We're all of us in for a very similar battle; we can refute, rebel, and reject, or we can accept it. Like the bumper sticker says, none of us get out of this life alive.
All these years later, I know who my grandmother was and I
know who she wasn’t. She was the pint-sized woman who wore her golden hair in
that tight and curly schoolmarm look, who took the bus everywhere she went,
whose favorite store was Macy’s, who was that typical sitcom grandmother who
was infamous for giving us kids the kinds of embarrassing clothes that would’ve
gotten us beat up at recess had we actually worn them to school. I know that
who she was at the end wasn’t a fair and accurate reflection of who she was in
life. I understand that…but I haven’t made my peace with it, either. I can’t
think of her without thinking of that,
and that’s horrific and unkind, but necessary and perhaps unavoidable.
Cinematic horror screams one thing in your ear while whispering something else
behind your back, but real-life horror like Relic looks you right in the eye and shows you, directly, what fear
looks like and warns you that you’ll never be free of it.
