Review: ‘Amulet’ is an Ambitiously Demonic Psychodrama Lacking Experience

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Romola Garai’s feature film debut with Magnolia Pictures, Amulet (2020) is nothing short of a meditative creepfest, both in skin-crawling and in its crawling pacing. It’s an ambitious film that dives into heavy material, from the psychology of combat assault and PTSD to demonology and feminine power. And while Garai is resourceful in her inspirations and execution, Amulet suffers from a meandering, overly ambitious plot that doesn’t quite know what to do with the challenging premises. 

Tomaz (Alec Secareanu), a former soldier and now refugee in London, is homeless and alone when his shelter catches fire. He’s found by Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton) who takes him to the rotting home of Magda (Carla Juri), a young woman caring for her ailing mother. In exchange for lodging, Tomaz cares for the home and soon grows to care for the seemingly naive and tortured Madga. But as increasingly bizarre, grotesque events occur, and Tomaz and Madga’s relationship grows, the mystery of the old woman in the attic unravels until there is no escape the horrific reality. 

The story is peppered with flashbacks of Tomaz’s former life, working a remote checkpoint in an unspecified war-torn country. It is here he uncovers the titular amulet buried in the woods, and is confronted by a woman fleeing to the border to find her lost child. Tomaz, awash with empathy and loneliness, takes her in, seemingly to protect her from soldiers, but perhaps with more selfish inclinations under the surface. It’s a classic “sins of the past” story, inserting Tomaz into his own remote checkpoint in Magda’s home, with unknowable consequences. 

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The gradual narrative burns like a soy candle, crawling through insert shots of slugs, foliage, and rotting home trim. There’s a difference between slow burn and just slow, and the film struggles with pacing as it works its way through stylized shots at random: hazing edges, racking focus, overexposure, actor steady-cam mounts, dialogue voice-overs – pretty much a menagerie of dreamy snapshots that hold little thematic relevance. It’s a strong attempt at creating the unsettling aspects of great psychological horror, like Polanski’s Repulsion or Zulawski’s Possession (which the filmmakers cites as a direct influence), but in context feels forces and overexerted in an attempted fantasy aesthetic. The issue comes from it being all too much for little symbolic or psychodramatic payoff. While the shots are well-managed, beautiful in their own right, there is a myriad of story elements that get overshadowed, confused, or downright forgotten by the stylistic choices. The mistrust that these elements have landed is easy to see in the climax, when also writer Garai dives heavily into exposition to carry her premise to fruition. She certainly has an eye for composition, but the meat of the fable is circumvented by her eagerness to jam all her directorial tricks into one basket, and then letting her writerly fear that the audience may “miss the point” strike heavy-handed at the end. 

Garai does an immaculate job with the monstrous moments in her allegory, primarily through the use of practical FX. Magda’s mother is particularly haunting, shown fairly early on in her all decomposing glory. She’s equally tragic and terrifying, which does wonders for her presence throughout the story as assumed captor of Magda. The decaying homestead bears its own eerie mystery, and there’s much anticipation for what Tomaz might find while he works to clean up the home, however, after a few initial, well-crafted shocks, it become an afterthought. What should be a growing tension ebbs and flows into obscurity as we are thrust more and more into Magda and Tomaz’s relationship, and less and less into the horror play in the home. While the story is primarily about breaking down the Tomaz’s psyche, it’s curious how much time and effort was put into the physical reality of his situation, and it just feels like a lack of commitment to either style instead of a mesmerizing marriage of the form. 

This is equally true of the score, which I found myself buzzing over during the initial chimes of the bell and cello chapel music playing in Tomaz’s opening dream. Like a ringing in your head, unnerving but somewhat soothing, it has a pensive quality that hums like salvation. Most notably when Sister Clair brings Tomaz to Madga’s home for the first time, the harmony of imagery and tone really made me feel like I was watching something special come together. But the film parts from this feeling quickly, and I couldn’t tell you in retrospect how the musivisual elements moved me as the story progressed. That’s not to say it wasn’t there, so much as it wasn’t as captivating or transformative to the film by roll credits. 

The story of Magda and her mother plays as illusory role reversal to the events at Tomaz’s checkpoint, where Tomaz is in the position of his past-life captive, Miriam (Angeliki Papoulia), in Magda’s home. The ghosts of his actions with Miriam haunt him – to the point where he binds his own hands at night to protect himself from the nightmares, but his personal guilt is not enough for the gods of vengeance. Or, in this case, goddess. The film plays to a feminist allegory that isn’t clearly defined until the final fifteen minutes, hinging on the protective imagery of a seashell – and banging the audience over the head with it. Think Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, carrying the goddess in her clamshell, or Da Vinci’s Annunciation, in which the Virgin Mary is told she is to be the mother of God. The shell as protective symbol of fertility and femininity pronounces itself with little subtly at the climax as Tomaz climbs directly into the symbolic…I’m going to say, “bat cave.” It’s a fitting analogy once you’ve seen what’s in the literal and figurative pipes. 

Carla Juri’s performance as Magda is truly the most hypnotic piece of the puzzle here. As much as I was looking forward to Imeda Staunton’s Sister Clair, no matter how earnest we’re supposed to believe her to be, she will always be Dolores Umbridge and therefore inherently evil, so no surprises there. Alec Secareanu is also wonderful as tortured Tomaz, epitomizing a savior stereotype that’s struggling with the real implication of his past. Next to Staunton and Secareanu, however, Juri is a triple threat of innocence, shrewdness, and playful seduction. She’s powerful in her quiet moments, and those times when she’s childish and homely, you really want Tomaz’s growing love to save her. That’s assuming she needs saving. Yet she’s equally unnerving as her stoic acceptance of the horrors surrounding her, making her hard and unrelenting and, ultimately, beautiful. 

Amulet courses with subtext and meaning that, in the hands of a more experienced director and writer, could have truly shaken the mold in psychological horror drama. The symbolism and subtly in the beginning is traded for heavy physical imagery and exposition at the end, with a floating middle that rambles between core storytelling and compulsive artistry. It’s unbalanced, yet not uninteresting, and ambitiously driven to tell a multi-faceted story that could have benefited from some story-editing. Romola Garai will definitely get more opportunities and experience, and I’m eager to see where she goes next. 

Amulet is now available in theaters and On Demand.

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