In a haunted-house movie, theres no escape. When terror originates inside your own home, you can never really get away from it. Grief and the inevitability of death operate much the same way, giving the microgenre opportunities for rich subtext. Sure, all those creaks and creeps are fun, but the thing that makes a haunted house shine is whats happening beneath the foundation.

Natalie Erika James knows that well. She is the director and co-writer of Relic , a Sundance hit newly available on video-on-demand services. In depicting a family grappling with Alzheimers, Relic uses the grammar of a traditional haunted-house flick a camera that closely tracks characters movements; dim, angular interiors; walls that seem to expand and contract to make the bleakness of the story more palatable.

Emily Mortimer and Bella Heathcote play a mother and daughter Kay and Sam, respectively who arrive at Kays mothers home to find her missing. When the fussy octogenarian, Edna (Robyn Nevin), returns dirty and bruised, she wont say where shes been. From there, things get ominous. Kay finds cryptic Post-it reminders throughout the rooms, including an alarming one that says, Dont follow it. The house slowly comes alive, enveloping its inhabitants as the vitality drains out of Edna.

Relic is a sharp, surefooted feature directorial debut for James, a 30-year-old Japanese Australian rookie who collaborated on the script with Christian White. By phone, James explained what inspired the film:

Her Own Familys Experience With Alzheimers

Relic was born out of a trip James took to visit her grandmother, who had developed Alzheimers, in rural Japan. It was the first time her grandmother didnt recognize her. James had made short films that gave real-life issues like abortion and motherhood a horror filter, and she quickly realized that Alzheimers called for a similar treatment.

She started contemplating how her grandmothers mental deterioration affected her relationship with her own mother, which led to the movies premise of three women dealing with intergenerational dynamics. The backdrop was obvious, too. She lived in this really creepy traditional Japanese house wed been really scared of as children, James said of her grandma. So I think those two things converged really organically.

James initially planned to set the film in Japan, but when the project got financing from the Australian governments production fund, she relocated the story to the continent where she currently lives. Finding a suitable house wasnt easy. The most common haunted-house tropes belong to American and British cinema, and Australian architecture doesnt offer the same features, James said. There are no basements, for example. Country estates tend to be long, single-story buildings, whereas James wanted stairs and a slanted roof.

So she concocted a workaround: Ednas late husband would be an architect whod designed an unconventional home. For the shoot, James and her production designers used three different locations two real houses and another section built on a soundstage to simulate one increasingly claustrophobic domicile.