Review: ‘Amulet’ delivers a grueling, timely feminist statement

Who says horror is dead. While major movie theatre chains remain largely closed this year, due to the ongoing health crisis, streaming and VOD releases continue offering necessary escapes for our anxiety-addled minds. Mid-pandemic, films like Relic and The Rental have certainly captured our collective imaginations, deep-diving into vastly contrasting genres and giving fans a true feast. Now enter Romola Garai’s directorial debut Amulet, a film so viciously artistic, mean, and gritty that it’ll grip you from start to finish. You may even totally unhinge your jaw by the finale.

Garai, known for her acting work in Atonement, BBC’s Emma mini-series, and Amazing Grace, once read a book surrounding international affairs, efforts to prosecute rape as a war crime, and how many violators are said to “recategorize” their abuses, leading them to live seemingly normal post-war lives. She was greatly inspired to cook up such a character, one who couldn’t possible see his savior complex as anything other. “I think because I wanted to talk about some quite elemental ideas about the persecution of women, and I wanted the audience to be physically sharing the extreme emotions that persecution engenders in women, it seemed better to describe these in these more ‘extreme’ or visceral forms,” she described.

Garai plays with our senses and perceptions of reality. Tomaz, played by Alec Secareanu, harbors a wealth of pain and trauma, some of which is not his own. From the opening frames, Garai paints him as one worthy of our pity and empathy but whose wholly unreliable ⏤ initially, you don’t quite know or understand that there is anything wrong, but frequent flashbacks to his time in war as a checkpoint guard tease something truly unspeakable. Garai leads a trail of breadcrumbs, and you, perhaps, might assume he witnessed some great horrors that have since irreparably damaged him.

You’d only be partially correct.

In the present, Tomaz is a bearded, PTSD-ridden shell of a man who is barely keeping his sanity and livelihood as a fix-it repairman in tact. You’re immediately struck by his genteel spirit, and it appears he is yet another victim of the war machine, with no assistance or resources to rebuild his life. An accident strikes, and his night-time shelter is stolen from him, also scattering its many other homeless residents into the night.

A kindly, good-natured nun named Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton) offers room and board, if only he’ll offer up his services to assist the downtrodden, mousy Magda (Carla Juri) with her disease-stricken mother. He accepts; anything is better than spending another cold, rainy night on the streets.

Garai roots her 99-minute feature with an arthouse elegance, working earthy color schemes and camera angles to tighten the tension as much as possible. It reads as a drama, assuredly, in the first half, only hints of something far more sinister peeking through tattered wallpaper and crumbling plaster, and this psycho-drama style hooks the viewer in almost immediately. Amulet, greatly inspired (stylistically) by Ben Wheatley’s Kill List and A Field In England, as well as Peter Strickland’s Katalyn Varga and The Duke of Burgandy, smolders ⏤ slowly revealing its underlying message of feminist strength, punishment, and the vile nature of mankind in delectable increments.

Amulet might just be the year’s most divisive film. But it is far more satisfying to swing big than to deliver up a dish half-cooked. As things escalate, and Magda’s emotional baggage comes to light, there remains little doubt that Tomaz’s violent past will finally catch up to him. Sure enough, revelation upon revelation hammers home the film’s overarching thesis: all crimes against humanity must see proper punishment.

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