Relic

• Relic had a 30-day shoot, with principal photography running from October 8 to November 16, 2018, filming around Melbourne and the country town of Creswick, Victoria.
• Director Natalie Erika James and co-writer Christian White had already drafted the Relic screenplay before making their 2017 short film 'Creswick' — the short grew out of the feature's development rather than the feature growing out of the short.
• James drew on her own grandmother's Alzheimer's diagnosis in writing the film; star Emily Mortimer has said she connected to the material because her late father also suffered from dementia, and she leaned on that grief for the role.
• The house's black mold and the film's late prosthetic makeup were built almost entirely practically. Creature and prosthetic design came from Larry Van Duynhoven and Scarecrow Studios, with special effects supervised by David Trethewey of DTFX.
• Relic premiered at Sundance on January 25, 2020, and was quickly picked up by IFC Midnight for North American distribution. It was produced by Jake Gyllenhaal's Nine Stories Productions (with Riva Marker) alongside Carver Films' Anna McLeish and Sarah Shaw, and executive produced by Anthony and Joe Russo's AGBO.

The black mold is Edna's body extending into the house — she's not being consumed, she's becoming the architecture. Her mother vanished the same way, and the house has been one woman's body trading skins across generations.

Sam doesn't escape at the end. The final image of Kay tenderly removing the rot from her own mother mirrors Edna's earlier compulsive scrubbing — Kay has already inherited the compulsion to preserve what's decomposing, binding her to the same cycle.

The 'other Edna' stalking the house isn't a monster. It's Edna's future self, what she becomes when the disease finishes its work. The horror is temporal: three versions of the same woman coexisting in one rotting structure.

Edna vanishes from her decaying country home. Daughter Kay and granddaughter Sam fly in to find her, then to find what she's becoming. Dementia here isn't forgetting — it's being forgotten, from the inside out. The house grows black mold like a second circulatory system. Walls breathe. Something lives behind the wallpaper, and it's been waiting generations. James stages horror in the gap between caretaking and self-erasure, where three women face the same rot from different vantages. The ending doesn't flinch: inheritance is a body handed down, still warm.