A haunted-house horror and domestic drama about three generations of women, Relic begins with Kay and her adult daughter returning to Kay's elderly mother's isolated rural homestead after she is reported missing. When Edna returns within a few days with no memory of where she was and no injury (aside from a small bruise), she is cleared by doctors and Kay and her daughter assume she is suffering from dementia. The remainder of the film regards the family's interactions around how to continue to support Edna (or not), where exactly she has been, and what is the mysterious mold that appears to be growing in Edna's cavernous and possibly-malevolent house.
It stars Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin, and Bella Heathcote as the family's three generations.
Relic contains examples of:
- Alien Geometries: At one point, Sam enters a hidden passageway in a closet, to find a replica of the same closet. The rooms loop and the dimensions change, until Sam escapes through the wall. Later, Sam and Kay escape into the same looping corridors and break their way out through the chimney breast.
- Allegory: Basically the whole movie is an allegory about dementia's generational impact on a family, especially when it is implied dementia is passed down generation to generation. This becomes explicit at the end.
- Anti-Villain: Edna is the closest thing to a real villain the movie has. Relic has no ghosts, monsters, or demons in the literal sense. But she is essentially just as scared by what's happening as her daughter and grand-daughter, and her violence and threats could be explained by dementia and feeling haunted.
- Anxiety Dreams: Kay has several of these about the lonely death of her great-grandfather in the now-demolished cabin on the property. Soon, these dreams transition to being about Edna.
- The Bad Guy Wins: Arguably. The bad guy is hereditary dementia, and the ending seems to imply that the three generations of women accept their fates and will support each other nonetheless.
- Bigger on the Inside: The walk in closet isn't small to begin with, but then you find what it connects to...
- Body Horror: Multiple instances, but the ending in particular depicts Kay stripping her mother's skin off, piece by piece, to reveal a demon-like but frail creature underneath whom she embraces.
- Cell Phones Are Useless: Somewhat averted by the fact that the movie rarely engenders situations where a cell-phone would be useful, with one exception. Played straight in the scene where Sam is trapped in the house's changing walls and can't call for help with phone, which she instead uses as a flash light.
- Downer Ending: Edna has had her identity all but erased by her dementia, and Kay looks likely to suffer the same fate.
- Eldritch Location: There's a closet with a locked door that looks normal at first, until you push some of the various stored objects out of the way and find it connects to other places seemingly deeper within the house, some of which narrow in strange ways. Sometimes gravity may lean you one way, then a different one later. Good luck getting out!
- Everybody Lives: Although it's not 100 percent clear that the goblin-like entity that Kay embraces at the end is Edna, alive, basically nobody dies at all in this movie. There are memories about a particularly nasty death that happened generations ago.
- Malevolent Architecture: At one point, in the replicating hallway, the walls start to close in and almost crush Sam to death.
- Naked Nutter:
- Edna's burgeoning dementia is revealed in the very first scene of the film, in which she is found standing naked in the living room, staring blankly at nothing.
- In the finale, at the very nadir of Edna's physical and mental disintegration, a heartbroken Kay helps to peel away the last of her mother's rotting flesh until all that remains is a naked skeletal being with no personality or consciousness.
