Niamh Algar in the terrifying new horror 'Censor'

The hit of the Sundance film festival, Mullingar actress Niamh Algar's latest film 'Censor' is a bone-chilling new horror film that mixes fact and fiction in deeply unsettling ways. If you lived through the 1980s you may remember the “video nasty” controversies. When VCRs first emerged they were a new technology and so not as tightly regulated as the local cinemas, a fact horror film directors took full advantage of producing gorefests that pulled the crowds and made big box office. Slasher flicks like The Evil Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre did big business, startling filmgoers with literally eye-popping special effects, and in the process creating growing social hysteria and moral outrage. Would these ghastly films corrupt their young viewers, inspiring a new generation of rapists and murderers critics asked?
These vexed questions and more are asked again by Censor, the new and (take it from me) terrifying horror film starring breakout Irish star Niamh Algar, 28, the Mullingar born actress best known for her work with director Ridley Scott on the sci-fi series Raised By Wolves and the Michael Fassbender produced Irish crime drama Calm With Horses.

In 2018 Algar was named one of Screen International’s “Screen Stars of Tomorrow” and in 2019 she was selected by BAFTA as one of their Breakthrough Brits, although she is in fact Irish. 2020 saw her achieve even more fame in HBO's and Scott's hit sci-fi. In Censor Algar plays (appropriately enough) a young film censor called Enid Baines who takes great pride in her meticulous work, guarding impressionable cinema audiences from the dangers of all the gore-filled decapitations, eye-gouging's and rapes that she pores over each day. But things get even more disturbing when her sense of duty to protect the innocent is mirrored by guilt over her inability to recall the important details of the long-ago disappearance of her sister, who has recently been declared dead in absentia.