Romola Garai’s Amulet Needs a Polish

The heart of Romola Garai’s Amulet, her debut as director, beats deep within the film’s running time, which confounds analysis of her work without giving away the ending. It’s a heavily backended piece, in other words: In keeping with expectations of so-called “elevated” horror, most of Garai’s best flourishes arrive after around an hour of slow-burning insinuations tied to a flashback structure, wherein Tomaz (Alec Secareanu), a former Romanian soldier now squatting in London and doing odd jobs for cash, routinely dreams about what could be the precipitating incident that led him to leave the military and flee his home.
It’s easy to deduce that something bad happened between Tomaz and Miriam (Angeliki Papoulia) at the woodland crossing zone he manned, but Garai holds back the truth for a critical length of time, just beyond the point where the mystery built from the beginning curdles into thematic indistinction. Tomaz meets a nun, Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton), who makes lilting Biblical introductions with him first, and offers him work at a crumbling row house: “Like the lamb,” she says, “he did return into the fold, into the blessed light.” The house belongs to Magda (Carla Juri), a young immigrant like Tomaz, who barely leaves as she’s essentially chained to her sickly mother and tends to suffer a bruise or two in plain sight. Mom, coming to the end of her life as well as her humanity, lashes out at Magda’s care.
Tomaz, made wary by life experience as much as by nature—and being as the scenario itself screams of enigmatic dangers—enters the arrangement with an abundance of caution and his wartime baggage. This proves wise roughly half an hour into the movie, when Tomaz discovers an alarmingly large batlike creature in the bowl while unclogging a toilet sloshing with brackish water. It’s dead, he thinks, until it springs shrieking back to life and bites him. If it isn’t obvious that Amulet has terrible secrets up its sleeve from the moment Tomaz sets foot in Magda’s home, and it’s well past obvious, then this encounter spells out the unknown threat in bold type.