20 Greatest Horror Movie Endings of the 2020s (So Far)
3. Relic
Perhaps one of the most criminally unsung horrors of the 2020s so far, Relic is a stunning psychological horror in which an elderly woman, Edna (Robyn Nevin), succumbs to a supernatural manifestation of dementia while her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) desperately try to stop it.
After a movie's worth of increasingly awful things befalling the family, Edna is left a skeletal, ashen shadow of her former self, at which point Kay realises that she can't leave her mother.
Instead, she carries Edna up to bed and peels away the remnants of her former self, leaving behind only a nightmarish husk. Kay and Sam lie on the bed with Edna as she falls asleep, just as Sam notices the very same decay on her own mother's neck, implying that the generational cycle will continue.
Though many are thoroughly fed up with horror-as-metaphor movies, especially as it pertains to trauma, grief, and illness, Relic's ending feels like a perfect heightened summation of the experience of loss, and how patterns can be inadvertently repeated throughout families.