There is more than a touch of ‘Buffy‘ Season 6 in the way Romola Garai‘s Midnight-dwelling directorial debut, “Amulet,” finally shakes down — and, I shouldn’t have to say, that’s a compliment. The much-maligned penultimate season of Joss Whedon‘s era-defining TV show has recently come in for gratifying reevaluation as its darker tone, the greater pessimism of its worldview and especially its investigation of a masculinity that in 2002 had scarcely even begun to be described as “toxic,” have proven prescient indeed. Garai’s film, an unusually confident one for a first-time writer-director, is naturally more cinematic and better crafted than any 20-year-old TV episode (except in the tacky phantasmagoric CG of one rather unnecessary explanatory scene late on), but the spirit that animates it is definitely similar. Yes, this is me trying to avoid spoilers (the dodging of which feels more than usually important if this story’s more ambitious somersaults are going to land for you) while still dog-whistling about the nature of the themes those spoilers may deal in.
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“Amulet” is a horror movie which baits-and-switches cleverly—and angrily—about who is the horror’s innocent victim, and who’s its guilty cause. And as a haunted house film, its ornate mythology pulls the dingy rotting rug out several times from under our initial idea of who is the haunter and who the hauntee. This is especially impressive because it’s largely a perfectly cast two-hander, though the ghosts of past trauma and the demons of our worst natures are physically present enough to leave bite marks and scratches on the living, and to sometimes well up from the plumbing in the form of ghastly, pink-skinned batlike creatures.
In the case of Tomaz (Alec Secareanu) — a veteran of the Yugoslav wars who now leads a rootless immigrant existence England picking up odd jobs as a day laborer—his trauma is powerful enough that he ties himself to his flophouse bed each night to prevent injury in the throes of his night terrors. In parallel, his backstory unfolds, and we meet him as a young soldier assigned to the forested countryside, where he one day finds a small carved figurine —the amulet of the title. Some time after, while guarding a lonely outpost, a woman (Angeliki Papoulia) comes running, terrified, out of the woods towards him, not stopping even when he raises a trembling rifle at her. But Tomaz does not shoot, instead at some danger to himself, he hides her from her pursuers. This act of sensitivity, the casual anti-immigrant abuse he suffers in England, and his clearly tormented, PTSD-scarred psyche (not to mention the image of Secareanu cradling a newborn lamb in a chunky sweater that has been imprinted on anyone who has seen “God’s Own Country“) all work him into our sympathies immediately. Watch out for that.
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When he loses his belongings and his makeshift home in a fire, Tomaz is taken under the wing of Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton) who promptly delivers him to a crumbling, rotting house where he can live rent-free if he just takes care of some handyman jobs around the place. The house is occupied by Magda (Carla Juri) a pallid, withdrawn young woman in the flat shoes and dowdy headscarf of an elderly Polish peasant, who cooks for him but mostly tends to her bedridden mother upstairs. Her delicacy and inexperience of the world, and the way her unseen mother abuses her so hideously works her into our (and Tomaz’s) sympathies too. Again, you want to watch out for that.
This is the type of horror more reliant on atmosphere (and DP Laura Bellingham’s canted angles and yeasty palette) than sensory assault; on scratching noises and muffled voices rather than things that go boom in the night. Although, when necessary Garai does not shy away from some pretty grisly, oozy, and grotesque practical effects, even if their varied nature can feel a little arbitrary.
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But perhaps Garai’s chief weapons in her war on our surprise cortex are her actors, with Juri, of “Blade Runner 2049” fame and “Wetlands” infamy negotiating her character’s satisfying fuck-you of a finale as adeptly as Secareanu plays the subtler shades of a man whose seeming nobility and decency may be sincere or may be a facade concealing his true nature, even from himself. Papoulia’s flashback-fugitive Miriam also affects a convincing transformation from imperiled damsel to shrewd survivor, while the stalwart Staunton gets to reverse on and subvert her sharp-eyed Sister Claire until she’s more in the “Black Narcissus” neighborhood of filmic nunnery than “The Sound Of Music.“
It’s a cliche that actors-turned-directors make good directors-of-actors, but it’s also often true, and one of Garai’s most welcome traits is a quiet attentiveness to the modulations of performance when the genre she’s nominally working in often favors splashier dramatics. But that does mean her film, for all its supernatural trappings and rotting-carcass gory moments might not scratch a diehard horror aficionado’s itch —especially in a final stretch that, while diverting, occasionally diverts into silliness, and which confirms that Garai is not so much interested in scaring you as letting you know that she is pissed. [B]
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