Amulet is the feature-length directorial debut of actor Romola Garai – having cut her teeth on a short feature in 2012, here she has created a very sombre, often very gritty horror story, a world away from the period dramas in which she has so often appeared. In touch with her short feature, however, there’s a fascination with the sylvan – of what could be waiting in the woods, and why. The resulting film is an enterprising, often creative horror which splices its visual artistry with a pervasive atmosphere. There are a handful of issues, but nothing which derails what is otherwise an immersive and unsettling film.
Showcasing its aesthetic sensibilities very early, we fade from a beautiful woodland into a sparse, but still cosy interior – and a young man whose existence in this middle-of-nowhere, manning a checkpoint in an unspecified warzone, seems to find him very content. But, just as the woodland landscape ceded into this young man’s everyday, so that quickly disappears into another. Moving forward by a period of years, this same young man – Tomaz (Alec Secareanu) is now an impoverished temporary worker in England, making ends meet with building work. The close-up shots on his face – claustrophobic, unnerving – showcase his misery, and form a clear contrast to the life he once had. Something disastrous much have compelled him here. Barely surviving a fire in his lodgings one night, he finds himself hospitalised and realises he must make changes. He contemplates going home at first, but the intervention of a well-intentioned local, Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton) convinces him that there could be a different way forward. Introducing him to a socially-isolated young woman called Magda (Carla Juri), Sister Claire suggests that he could help her as she nurses her terminally-ill mother; in return, he receives food and shelter. Short of feasible other options, and drawn to the frail, introspective Magda, Tomaz agrees to stay for a while.
It soon becomes clear that this is a quite extraordinary situation. Magda is adamant that her mother will not allow their new lodger anywhere near her; she remains an unknown quantity, a ‘madwoman in the attic’ in pretty literal terms. Tomaz determines to do what he can to make the house more comfortable nonetheless and – against the backdrop of life in the house – Tomaz and Magda become friends. However, as always with an atmosphere of concealment, that which each character has to hide will come out. In the case of Tomaz, we come to slowly understand what brought his tranquil loneliness in the woods to an end.
The film feeds viewers its plot in a very languid way overall, albeit with a few shocks and abundant foreshadowing; this gives way to a much sharper set of narrative developments towards the end of the film, with a number of plot points walked through very quickly in a way which I felt the film could do without; its key strengths are in its gradual reveals. It has something of the look and feel of a small number of other British genre films of recent years – films like Possum, Saint Maud and Tony, with their own stories following people who live on the fringes of society, concealing grave histories within themselves. Amulet, like these, presents a new, but recognisable kind of poverty on-screen: poverty as it often looks now, I suppose, with dilapidation stemming back to the 70s and 80s, houses gradually crumbling since then. Amulet also calls to something far older, though; there are aspects of the ‘old dark house’ genre, forbidden spaces and old terrors. The film makes space for the monstrous, too. There is plenty of appetite here on Garai’s behalf to experiment with form and genre.
It’s also interesting that Amulet also brings us a male character who is not ‘in the know’, someone who is shown to us as lacking power almost from the very start. His lack of knowledge and awareness are at first fundamental to making him endearing; the more he is shown to know, or the more he comes to terms with, the less of an endearing character he is. However, his eventual narrative arc – again, linking to the sudden deluge of plot points towards the end of the film – is not without issue. Though we could argue perhaps that a sense of disorientation is no bad thing to feel for a horror audience, leaving some things unsaid would have served the film better overall.
Still, for a first feature, Amulet is very accomplished and deserves credit for it: it draws on many elements of the familiar as well as the unfamiliar, weaving together a story of a shrinking, uncertain and monstrous world where agency breeds agony.
Amulet will be released onto VOD by Magnet Releasing on 24th July 2020.