Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote and Robyn Nevin star in Relic, but dementia is the real ghoul – Sydney Morning Herald

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I'm on my hands and knees, crawling through the hallway of a house that seems to get smaller and tighter the further I go. It's unnerving but not as much as the mould growing up the walls and the towering stacks of books, clothes, children's toys and who knows what else that teeter and threaten to collapse upon me as I go.

No, it's not a nightmare, it's the set of Relic, a horror movie of sorts about three generations of women Australian theatre legend Robyn Nevin as Edna, the grandmother; English actress Emily Mortimer (star of HBOs series The Newsroom) as Kay; and Bella Heathcote (The Man in the High Castle, Bloom) as her daughter Sam trapped together in a house that creaks and groans with the weight of memory even as Edna is losing hers.

It's a haunted house movie in which the ghoul is dementia. Maybe it is a nightmare after all.

"Some horror films are sort of an escape, like a ride on a roller-coaster or going into a haunted house, you scream and you feel somehow elated from the endorphins rushing through you as a result of being scared," says Mortimer, the 48-year-old New York-based but ever-so-English daughter of Rumpole of the Bailey creator John Mortimer. "But real life is in fact horrifying, with people dying, people getting old and people you love transforming in front of your eyes and not recognising you any more and their bodies literally falling apart."

It's not revealing too much about Relic to say it operates fully on the level of allegory, even while delivering its fair share of genuine chills, particularly in its final act. But this is horror in the vein of The Babadook rather than, say, The Conjuring, a more cerebral, relationship-focused psychological take on the genre in which the threat doesn't so much come from what's out there as what's inside us.

And for writer-director Natalie Erika James, it is a deeply personal story."My grandmother had Alzheimer's. I guess that's the simple version of it," she says matter-of-factly in a break between shots, as all around her crew are setting up for the next scene.

James was born in the US and raised around Asia by her Australian father and Japanese mother (he's a corporate executive who speaks Japanese; she's a lifelong student who has chalked up six degrees; James' parents met in Australia as 16-year-olds when her mother came here as an exchange student, and have been together ever since). In her early 20s, she kept putting off a trip to Japan to see her grandmother because life got in the way. When she finally made it after a gap of three years, she says, her grandmother "couldn't remember who I was. So it was that feeling of guilt at having prioritised my work over the family element that really was, I guess, the driving emotional core of the story."

Her grandmother is still alive, in an aged-care facility, but "she's pretty catatonic" and in need of total care, like an infant. And it was that shifting power dynamic within the family structure that James sought to capture albeit through the lens of the supernatural.

"It was this sense that someone you love looks exactly the same but they're becoming something else, or someone else," she says. "Nursing someone you have loved through death is one of the most horrifying experiences there is and yet also kind of beautiful and strange and mysterious and intense and full of all these emotions to do with guilt and the relationship that you're mourning that you never had, and the relationship that you wish you'd had, and trying to do the right thing, and yet feeling also kind of trapped.

"We don't really face death very much in our culture. It's like we act as if it doesn't happen and then are terribly shocked when it does. And, of course, it happens to all of us."

A little over a decade ago, it happened to Emily Mortimer. Her barrister-novelist father was ebbing away he died in January 2009, aged 85 and while he never had Alzheimer's he did, in his final months, develop dementia.

Mortimer says they were extremely close and she never felt anything but love and adoration from him. But there was a moment after she had flown back to England to be with him, "where my sister left the hospital room to go for a cigarette or a coffee or something, and she said, 'Oh Dad, Em's here now, I'll leave you with her.' And he turned around and looked at me, then looked at my sister, and [the look said], 'Who the f--- have you left me with?'

"It was a fleeting moment, but it was horrifying," she recalls. "It's horrifying when someone that has always only looked at you with love and seen you, every inch of you, and knows you, suddenly looks at you like they don't know who the f--- you are. That feels like a moment in a horror film, and that's what Nat has tapped into, that pain and confusion of people changing as they get ready to die and all the horror that it brings with it."

Mortimer is sitting on the other side of a plastic fold-up table from me, wearing a grey fluffy dressing gown over her shooting clothes in part to keep them clean and in part because it's rather chilly inside the cavernous warehouse in Melbourne's outer west that is doubling as a studio for the shoot. Glamorous this filmmaking business is not.

This being a relatively low-budget first feature for James, Mortimer certainly isn't here for the big dollars, unlike the first time she came to Australia, 20 years ago, for Hallmark's Noah's Ark a series so bad, she squeals delightedly, "that the feet of the CGI animals didn't even touch the ramp as they went into the ark they were hovering".

These days, with actor husband Alessandro Nivola and their two teenage children at home in New York, it takes something special to tempt her to the other side of the world.

"It's so f---ing far away," she says. "And it's quite a long time to be away. It's heartbreaking to not be at home, and always there's something that happens that makes you think, 'Why am I doing this to myself? I should be home with my kids'. But then you're like, 'No, this is the life Ive chosen for myself, this is how I make my living.' "

Emily MortimerCredit:Taylor Jewell

Still, choosing to work on any project so far from home involves a "cost-benefit analysis". But weighing heavily on the benefit side for Relic was the strength of the screenplay from James and co-writer Christian White, and of James's vision, which was evident in the prize-winning short film Creswick, a kind of proof-of-concept for the feature.

"There are times when you take jobs and I've done a few where you know however good it is it can't be great. That's an awful feeling," says Mortimer. "You do it because you feel you need to make some money or because you just have to work because you haven't for a while and you're like, 'Oh God, f---, I've got to do something otherwise I'll start losing my mind or lose my confidence,' or something. Or your agents persuade you it would be good for this reason or that, and you do it cynically. And generally those ones, there's no real possibility they'll ever be any good.

"But I just knew from having read the script and having met her that even if it failed, this was going to be a worthy experiment. It never felt like a risk."

Mortimer is far from the only one with faith in James. Relic was just the second project backed into production under Screen Australia's Gender Matters initiative the first being Jennifer Kent's violent, magnificent colonial-era revenge saga The Nightingale. Relic's producers include Hollywood star Jake Gyllenhaal and the Russo Brothers, Joseph and Anthony, who have co-directed four Marvel movies, including Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, the latter of which is the highest-grossing film of all time.

Local distributor Umbrella intended to go wide with Relic in cinemas until COVID-19 upended everyone's plans. Now Stan has picked the film up for release on July 10, the latest addition to its small but growing collection of Australian originals. (Umbrella still has plans for a limited theatrical release, but at time of writing this was still in negotiation.)

But if there are great expectations for James, on this day the reality is far more humble.

Natalie Erika James on the set of Relic.

As the rain pitter-patters on the corrugated-iron roof high above the set of the house, I watch them film a scene in which Nevin asks Mortimer to look under the bed because she thinks there's someone there. As Mortimer peers into the dark, a book drops onto her head over and over, take after take.

The scene finally in the can, I ask Mortimer if the role is dredging up memories and if she is tapping into the experience of watching her own father slip away for the work.

"Yes, you can't help it," she says. "But I've got impostor syndrome terribly, where I feel, 'I shouldn't be doing this', what is that thing of being in the moment, I don't know what that is; 'I never went to drama school, oh my God I'm just pretending.' I suffer terribly from feeling like, 'Oh, I should be just channeling every emotion I've ever had about being with a dying parent at this moment and yet I'm not, I'm distracted by my f---ing props or the book falling or whether or not I'm actually going to hit my head as I rise up.'

"You know, everything conspires for you to not be in the moment," she continues. "There's like two moments on a film generally where you come away and you feel like, 'that really worked and I was really feeling it, and at the moment I was feeling it they were filming me.' "

This is Bella Heathcote's second Stan original, following a starring turn in season 2 of Bloom.Credit:Stan

All that self-doubt and hand-wringing and book-dropping-on-head aside, though, Mortimer is convinced the emotional truth of what James has produced can't help but win through on the screen.

"Generally it's reminding you of everything that you've ever experienced about family life and about death and loss and grief and all the confusion of it, all the guilt. I think that's what she's got so good," she says.

"It's not just the pain and the heartbreak of losing someone you love. It's all the guilt and resentment and confusion of the mixed emotions I just think she's got brilliantly.

"It's not just the common experience that's universal that we've all had, Mortimer adds. "It's that she's got this particular vision that is hers and that is really odd, and yet it really speaks to something very kind of deep.

"She's cool. She's somebody to watch. Youll be writing about her in years to come, I think.

Relic is on Stan from July 10

Karl Quinn is a senior culture writer at The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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Emily Mortimer, Bella Heathcote and Robyn Nevin star in Relic, but dementia is the real ghoul - Sydney Morning Herald

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