A refugee soldier from an unnamed war, Tomaz (Secareanu) washes up in London, with no money and crippling PTSD, where a kindly nun (Staunton) sets him up as a live-in handyman for Magda (Juri), who is in turn caring for her decrepit mother. Everyone, inevitably, has grisly secrets that circle and threaten to consume them all, as Tomaz becomes increasingly convinced there are demonic forces at play.
Of course, there are: grisly, suppurating horrors that are older than Tomaz’s dented faith or his memories of standing guard at a forest check point when a terrified woman, Miriam (Papoulia), stumbles into his sanctuary. He’s processing the sinister events that followed there while Magda teases him and pushes him away, leaving the question of sympathy unanswered.
There’s tension and sadness in the dance between Tomaz and Magda, both fractured souls who seem to know no way to express even a fragment of happiness. Secareanu is less showy than Juri, who is given wilder limits as the frazzled and trapped nursemaid/daughter, even if he’s never quite given the narrative framework to connect his younger and older selves. Yet together Magda and Tomaz combine in their shared understanding of pain, and that’s what’s most meaningful here; at the same time, the slow-burn pagan gruesomeness and metaphysical horror never feels fully realized, like a highfalutin remake of The Lords of Salem without the B-movie verve. First-time writer/director Garai undoubtedly strikes a consistent mood of dread, amplified by Laura Bellingham’s luxuriously squalid cinematography. Unfortunately, there’s a lack of thematic coherence to her tale of dark magic, and a resolution that is neither as neat or satisfying as she seems to believe.
It’s the hints of a bigger world that never coalesce, a cosmology that never feels like world-building, and a smattering of well-executed creature effects that feel at odds with the brooding mood. Garai relies on a couple of tropes that feel culturally incomplete, like having the plot depend on a Catholic nun in contemporary Britain feels like a misplaced cliche (plus Staunton carries too much menace and malice to ever seem benevolent). Moreover, the abstraction of Tomaz – from somewhere Eastern European, potentially the Balkans, with all that implies about bloody history – feels too metaphorical to have the heft needed for the story. Worst of all, the fact that the key characters are all migrants fleeing conflict is used as set dressing, rather than cardinal motivation. It’s like Garai can never work out whether she wants this to be a modern Gothic fantasy, or a contemporary horror with deeper social meaning, then falls afoul of excessive coincidence. The parts of the spell are all there, but the conjuring is incomplete.
Amulet is available on VOD now.
This article appears in July 24 • 2020.
