A scary and stirring debut by Natalie Erika James, Relic blends creepy supernatural thrills with nightmare inducing visuals to make for a thoroughly frightening horror movie in which dementia is the demon.

The demons that can plague our bodies don’t have to be of the supernatural kind. Diseases can consume and transform the sturdiest of souls to the point of unrecognition. One of the most insidious of these is dementia, a neurological disorder that causes problems with thinking, memory, and reasoning, especially in the elderly. The number of cases of Alzheimer’s disease in Australia (in which Relic is set) has brought the issue of dementia to a national discussion. Unlike a horror movie, there is no exorcism that can get rid of this demon. It is a ghoul that will not go away, and many families have felt the brunt of its impact.

Such is the case of the family in Relic: matriarch Edna (Robyn Nevin), her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer), and Kay's ddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcoate). When Edna is reported missing from her farm property in countryside Victoria, Kay and Sam travel from the city to aid in the search. Edna returns, yet something sinister has not only taken over her mind and body, but also the family home in which the ghosts of the past has risen to create a nightmare reality.

Relic sits comfortably alongside classic haunted house fair such as The Amityville Horror and The Haunting in its treatment of the films decaying house as a character in itself, possessed with a spirit unforgiving and consuming, driving its inhabitants to madness and despair. Director Natalie Erika James takes the supernatural and anchors it to the real world, creating an uneasy, and at times perplexing, mix of haunted house/possession film tropes and heartbreaking drama. Relic is a story of a family in peril and out of their depth, haunted by an entity that is inevitable.

The films three leads are terrific. Mortimer puts on a convincing Australian accent while portraying the workaholic daughter that cannot comprehend the drastic changes in her mother, and Bella Heathcote gives perfectly portrays her characters youthful naivety to the unspeakable horrors about to be unleashed. The standout though is Robyn Nevin, who delivers a turn heartbreaking and terrifying as an independent widow caught in the thick black fog of mental illness.

James has delivered a horror movie of depth and despair in Relic, filled with a thick sense of atmosphere that gives way to terrifically structured and executed scares. It is also a film where its drama is as wrenching as its horror, reminding that some demons are more real than others.