Writer-director Romola Garai effectively plays with expectations in her debut feature film Amulet, but it takes a long time for her to subvert the initial set-up, and by the time she really cuts loose, the movie is nearly over. There’s a pervasive sense of dread to the uneasy relationship between refugee Tomaz (Alec Secareanu) and immigrant Magda (Carla Juri), who are placed together by a seemingly benevolent nun (Imelda Staunton) concerned for their welfare. But the source of that tension remains vague for the majority of the movie, and Garai relies on ominous sound cues and creepy set design to stand in for actual horror.
The movie opens with flashbacks to Tomaz’s time in the military of an unnamed, possibly Eastern European country, where he’s assigned to be the sole guard of a remote border crossing in the middle of a forest. There, he takes in a woman named Miriam (Angeliki Papoulia), who’s hiding from soldiers as she attempts to cross the border and reunite with her child. Some undetermined amount of time later, Tomaz is living in London as an undocumented refugee, squatting in an abandoned building and working as a day laborer. He’s clearly suffering from some sort of trauma, and each night before he goes to sleep he binds his hands with tape, apparently to avoid hurting himself (or others) during PTSD-induced night terrors.
After his makeshift home catches on fire, Tomaz barely escapes with his life, and he’s later approached by Staunton’s Sister Claire, who’s salvaged his belongings. She offers him new lodging at the dilapidated home of Magda and her sick, elderly mother, where he can stay for free in exchange for making repairs to the old, crumbling house. Magda is hostile to the new house guest at first , but Sister Claire insists that he stay. Magda’s mother remains hidden behind a locked door in an upstairs room whose windows are covered with newspaper, and Tomaz hears violent, anguished noises coming from the room whenever Magda tends to her mother.
That’s only one of the obvious signs that Tomaz should run as far away as possible from the house, but he stays in part because he has nowhere else to go and in part because he’s increasingly drawn to the shy, possibly abused Magda, who also slowly warms to him. The house has no electricity (because there is a danger of Magda’s mother attempting to electrocute herself), and the plumbing frequently belches up brownish water. That’s when it’s not expelling a pale pink creature that kind of looks like a bat and bites Tomaz before he can stomp it to death. Still, free rent is nothing to scoff at.
The present-day scenes are interspersed with further flashbacks to Tomaz’s military service, where he helps Miriam avoid arrest and gradually opens up to her. He also discovers the amulet of the title, a sort of totemic fertility figurine that he finds buried in the woods near his outpost. These scenes feature the same vague sense of dread, and both the past and present timelines appear to be building to some kind of horrific act, although Tomaz obviously survived whatever happened in the woods.
Garai (previously best known for her acting work, mainly in British period dramas) has trouble sustaining the unsettling atmosphere when so little happens in the first two-thirds of the movie, and the taciturn, traumatized Tomaz isn’t a particularly compelling character with his bottled-up emotions. Magda isn’t much of a character either, even when she appears to be letting loose a little after she allows Tomaz to take her dancing, allegedly her first outing in years away from her overbearing mother. It’s tough to get a handle on either of them as people, and whether they’re truly making a connection.
There’s a reason that Garai keeps these characters so opaque, though, and the twists pile up in the movie’s final third, which makes the story more exciting but less coherent. Staunton plays Sister Claire with a persistent edge that she’s able to fully embrace in the last act, and Garai depicts some truly gruesome body horror as well as some H.R. Giger-like cosmic weirdness. It’s a lot more engaging than what came before, but it’s mostly too little, too late. Just when the craziness starts to explode, the movie ends.
Tomaz’s refugee status and occasional mistreatment by nativist thugs suggests a story about xenophobia and assimilation, and his relationships with Magda and Miriam (and the eventual reveal of Magda’s true motives) suggest a story about countering the insidiousness of patriarchy. However, the movie never settles on a cohesive theme, prioritizing nastiness over thoughtfulness once it tips into full-on horror. Garai clearly has an eye for horror, and while Amulet doesn’t quite come together, it has enough disturbing ideas and imagery to make Garai’s next horror film worth a look.
Starring Alec Secareanu, Carla Juri, Angeliki Papoulia and Imelda Staunton, Amulet opens Friday in select theaters and on VOD.