Amulet

Way back in 2012, the actor Romo­la Garai made a star­tling and accom­plished short film called Scrub­ber, and it sug­gest­ed she had a viable career both in front of and behind the cam­era. Then, all went qui­et for close to a decade, until it was announced that her debut fea­ture, Amulet, would pre­mière at the 2021 Sun­dance Film Festival.

Was this the film that would cap­i­talise and expand on the immense promise of Scrub­ber? Yes… and no. It’s actu­al­ly a very dif­fer­ent cin­e­mat­ic prospect: a wild­ly ambi­tious, idio­syn­crat­ic and very Eng­lish domes­tic hor­ror sto­ry baked in the mould of Clive Bark­er​’s sem­i­nal S&M gore wig-out, Hell­rais­er, from 1987. It’s also a sto­ry inter­est­ed in explor­ing the chasm of under­stand­ing between male and female expe­ri­ence when it comes to mat­ters of the body.

Amulet ini­tial­ly sets its stall as a piece of bleak, win­tery social real­ism as fraz­zled bor­der guard Tomaz (Alec Secare­anu) is shown to have fled from an unnamed, vague­ly Eas­t­en Euro­pean civ­il war to the UK. The now cus­tom­ary intol­er­ance of refugees leaves our hero bruised and pen­ni­less, and sud­den­ly at the beck and call of Imel­da Staunton’s Sis­ter Claire who decides to give him bed and board, but essen­tial­ly accepts his auton­o­my as pay­ment. This accounts for about the open­ing 15 min­utes of the film, and it feels as if the pieces are being shift­ed into the attack for­ma­tion for a ghoul­ish sur­vival hor­ror with some fair­ly trans­par­ent polit­i­cal trappings.

Yet Garai refus­es to take the obvi­ous route, instead tin­ker­ing with the con­text, and pick­ing up on strange threads which lead into a world of high goth­ic fan­ta­sy. Tomaz’s dire per­son­al sit­u­a­tion ends up being less of a sig­nal as to which way things are head­ed, as there’s deep­er inter­est in the fact that he is a man and he is expect­ed to cleave to the tra­di­tion­al image of the patri­archy. Also, he should pro­tect the woman with whom he is in love.

The woman in ques­tion is Car­la Juri’s emo­tion­al­ly frag­ile Mag­da who also lives in the house and is bur­dened with the sole task of car­ing for her sick moth­er slumped in the attic. With direct expe­ri­ence of the trau­ma of war, Tomaz feels as if he can eas­i­ly lend a hand, and that’s where things go a lit­tle off the rails. Not every­thing in the film is com­plete­ly log­i­cal, and there are a few late-game plot jerks where the inten­si­ty of the images on screen don’t quite match the per­ceived psy­cholo­gies of the characters.

Yet this is at the expense of Garai land­ing a fer­vent broad­side against both female oppres­sion – from men, from moth­ers, from sup­posed social supe­ri­ors – and the gen­er­al apa­thy extend­ed towards the lives of those who tend to perch on the low­er rungs of life. What’s more, the sat­is­fy­ing descent into SFX freak-out allies Amulet to a strain of hor­ror in which the pure plea­sure of grotesque vis­cera is some­times enough to trump a more con­ven­tion­al and plain­ly stat­ed dénoue­ment. In all, here’s hop­ing that it’s not anoth­er decade before Garai is writ­ing and direct­ing again.