From Hereditary to The Babadook to The Witch to Get Out to A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night to The Blair Witch Project, Sundance has been the birthplace for a plethora of horror gems. This year, one of the most acclaimed was Relic, the debut feature from Australian-Japanese director Natalie Erika James. Starring Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin, and Bella Heathcote, the haunted house film will get a release this July via IFC Midnight and the first teaser has landed.
Our friend Rob Hunter at Film School Rejects said, “Relic is a new film out of Australia that appears, on its surface, to be a simple but effective little chiller, but while it succeeds mightily with a creepy atmosphere and some terrifying scares, it also ends with one of the most beautiful sequences I’ve ever seen in a horror film. In less than ninety minutes it takes you from abject terror to utter tears.”
Backed by The Russo Brothers and their company, AGBO, and Jake Gyllenhaal under his Nine Stories banner, see the teaser below.
When elderly mother Edna (Robyn Nevin) inexplicably vanishes, her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) rush to their family’s decaying country home, finding clues of her increasing dementia scattered around the house in her absence. After Edna returns just as mysteriously as she disappeared, Kay’s concern that her mother seems unwilling or unable to say where she’s been clashes with Sam’s unabashed enthusiasm to have her grandma back. As Edna’s behavior turns increasingly volatile, both begin to sense that an insidious presence in the house might be taking control of her. With RELIC, first-time writer/director Natalie Erika James crafts an unforgettable new spin on the haunted-house movie.
Relic opens on July 10.