'Amulet' Review: The horror film abandons jumpscares as intense performances don't overpower the baffling plot
Spoilers for ‘Amulet’
It’s always refreshing to see a horror film that doesn’t use cheap scares to bolster a weak story. Romola Garai’s ‘Amulet’ does a step further and discards jumpscares altogether. But does that act of defiance from mainstream horror norms make ‘Amulet’ a good film? That’s a tough question.
The film centers around Tomaz (Alec Secareanu), a homeless man in London. But there are two stories here. One running in the film’s present. The other showing a past incident. Both stories reach a crescendo, before moving towards a surprising ending.
The present story focuses on Tomaz moving into a house guided by a nun called Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton). From the get-go, it is apparent that there is more than meets the eye when it comes to Sister Claire. But Tomaz is both homeless and penniless. So he accepts her offer. She takes her to Magda (Carla Juri), who lives in a crumbling old house with her severely ill (and isolated) mother.
Sister Claire tells Tomaz that all he has to do to earn his keep is to help around the house. While he seems reluctant at first, he ultimately agrees. And he starts trying to repair the house as best as he can.
In the story of the past, we see a much younger Tomaz when he was a soldier, presumably in an Eastern-European nation, ravaged by war. There, Tomaz was a soldier manning a checkpoint. One day, his sleepy existence there is broken by a woman called Mariam (Angeliki Papoulia) running towards him, trying to cross the checkpoint and eventually the border. But she faints before Tomaz is forced to shoot her. Following that, he tends to her. Keeping her safe from passing soldiers, and even developing feelings for her.
Back to the present day, Tomaz begins developing feelings for Magda. But he realizes with each passing day that something is utterly wrong in the house, especially with the locked-up mother. The film reveals then that Magda’s mother is in demonic possession and keeps birthing the demon’s spawns (that Magda keeps killing). Tomaz wants to be her savior. But his dark past keeps coming back to him.
When Mariam, after staying many days with Tomaz, finally wants to leave, to attempt to cross the border in order to be reunited with her daughter, Tomaz is heartbroken. As Mariam runs, Tomaz does the unthinkable -- he tackles her and ultimately rapes her. Tomaz is revealed to not be a good person. And he pays the price for that, years later.
He tries to kill Magda’s mother and fails. The episode shook him so much that he was unconscious for two days. When he wakes up, he tells Magda again that he wants to save her. And the two have sex. But when Tomaz wakes up, he finds himself in a bathtub, covered in grime. Sister Claire is then revealed to be an agent of the demon, who has now passed its essence into Tomaz.
It is at this moment that the film takes an absolutely, inexplicably bizarre turn. At the very beginning of the film, we see Tomaz discovering an amulet of sorts – a white figurine of some kind of a goddess with a shell halo. An amulet that Mariam had taken a liking to. Now, as he comes to terms with his new nature, he kills Magda’s mother, wanting Magda to serve him instead. After killing the mother, he discovers that the body was not that of a woman at all, he sees male genitalia. Following that, he discovers one of the locked rooms inside the house has a giant glowing shell inside it. As he enters the shell, he finds the anthropomorphized version of that amulet.
As a scared Tomaz exits the shell but falls. He feels pain in his abdomen. And within moments, he begins to bleed from his nether region, signifying that he too was now birthing the demonic spawns. The film ends with Magda running into Mariam, who now runs a convenience store, presumably in an Eastern-European country. She hands her the amulet and drives into the sunset. At the back of the car, we see Tomaz, hidden away under a blanket, living in constant agony.
Both Secareanu and Juri’s performances are intense. Staunton’s classic insidious presence (even if little) is delicious. But does performance help the baffling story? Underlying themes of female emancipation and the toppling of a patriarchal force makes the story intelligent-looking. And the happy-ish ending makes for a weird change from the usual thoroughfare. But the film still does little to make things clear, even as it tries to.
At the same time, Garai’s first attempt at a horror film looks promising. The aura created throughout the film is not creepy in a traditional sense. But it does emit a sense of foreboding. And working to make two parallel plots meet (even if explained none too clearly), works in favor of the film.
‘Amulet’ may not be the best horror film to have ever been made, but it’s a cut above the rest.
The film is available for viewing on-demand.