Review: Romola Garai’s Amulet Reckons with the Ghosts of Traumas Past

Romola Garai’s Amulet centers around the much-discussed horror movie trope of the arcane or abject mother figure, combining its critical take on the typically masculine fear of aged women, their authority, and their bodies with a reflection on migration and women’s place in armed conflict. It’s an ambitious horror movie that, until a conclusion whose message is as obvious as its execution is messy, unobtrusively blends its socially minded elements with its atmospheric approach to the story’s accumulating gruesomeness.

Early in the film, its main character, Tomaz (Alex Secareany), the sole guard at a lonely border outpost during an unnamed war in an unidentified (but presumably Eastern European) country, discovers a pagan figurine of a woman buried in the forest that envelops his station. Years later, this figure ties together Tomaz’s recurring dreams of his time during the war with his experiences in England, after a fire devastates the home where he and other migrant workers are squatting. Tomaz, who’s suffering from a severe enough case of PTSD that he has to bind his hands when he goes to sleep, is taken in by a kindly nun, Sister Carrie (Imelda Staunton), after the squatters’ building burns down. Sister Carrie refers him to another immigrant, Magda (Carla Juri), who cares for her mother (Annah Ruddin) in a nearby ramshackle home—a place where Tomaz might find both shelter and work.

Amulet places itself in the long gothic tradition of using a house as a metaphor for the human psyche and, in particular, repression. With its darkened, moldy corners, its cracked wallpaper, and its forbidden attic, the house Magda claims she and her mother de facto inherited from a man who went missing constitutes a reflection of Tomaz’s soul. He’s surprised, then, when Magda proves uncomfortable with his poking into rotten holes in the wall and investigating the source of the building’s rancid water. Recovering from whatever trauma lurks in his past seems intuitively tied to uncovering what’s wrong in the house.

The middle stretch of the film really soaks into the crusty environment of Tomaz’s new rundown digs. We catch threatening glimpses of knives hanging in the kitchen and weathered porcelain figures of animals, the sickly sounds of Magda’s trademark red-brown gulasch being prepared and eaten, and lingering close-ups on structural damage that may or may not actually be arcane pagan symbols. But while the film’s sound design and cinematography effectively create an unnerving atmosphere, a lack of complementary tension in the story—with the notable exception of a deliciously disgusting scene involving a toilet tank and an albino bat—renders parts of Amulet’s long second act a bit monotonous.

Interspersed throughout the film are scenes that return us to the piecemeal memories revealed in Tomaz’s dreams, a flashback device that intermittently works to cut the monotony. Introduced through lap dissolves that transition us from the ruddy hues of Magda’s dilapidated house to the verdant but equally haunting space of Tomaz’s forest outpost, these sequences are aesthetically interesting. The memories coalesce into a story that unfolds in parallel to the events in Magda’s house: Tomaz’s drearily uneventful life at the checkpoint is interrupted when a woman (Elowen Harris) rushes toward it, fainting to the ground before he can muster the gall to shoot the trespasser, as he’s presumably been ordered to do.

Tomaz offers to let the woman, Dina, crash at his outpost until the end of the war, which he insists will be soon. Although the war has separated Dina from her daughter, with whom she appears desperate to reunite, she decides to wait the war out with the lonely Tomaz, and the two develop a cautious friendship. As both the dream story of Tomaz’s past and the horror story of his present progress, their relationship to one another inverts intriguingly, as the oneiric memories of the forest outpost crash down into the gritty realities of wartime abuses, and his life with Magda begins to follow a more nightmarish logic.

When eventually, inevitably, we get to see Magda’s mother, Garai goes full Evil Dead, concocting a demonology that’s as outlandish and muddled as the blood splatter, before concluding in a more Lynchian nightmare of spatial paradoxes and Freudian symbolism. Despite the carefully controlled structure of the whole, and the clarity of its central message, the final pieces of Amulet have a slapdash feeling that keeps the film from feeling either as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.