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Amulet, 2020

It is disappointing, but at the same time unsurprising, to see that a whopping 11% of IMDb users scored this film a 1/10. In many respects, the film is a hate magnet: slow paced, highly allegorical, a more nuanced/psychological form of "horror", and some of the least-subtle feminist/gender-related imagery I've seen recently.

And yet.

This film, the writing and directing debut of actress Romola Garai, has enough intriguing and/or disturbing imagery and a firm enough grasp on its main character that I think it's well worth checking out.

Tomas (Alec Secareanu) is a former soldier, living homeless. Offered free room and board if he will become a live-in handyman for a young woman, Magda (Carla Juri) and her very ill mother, Tomas's time in the house is intercut with flashbacks to his time as a soldier manning an isolated outpost and his encounter with a desperate refugee.

In a lot of films, and especially horror and thriller films, the question that lurks as a twist is "what did someone do?". Here that isn't really the question (if you can't guess in the first ten minutes, maybe you've never seen a movie before?). The question is: what are you going to do now? Who do you think you are, and what are you going to do about it?

Not in a literal sense (because that would be very spoiler-y), this film reminded me a bit of Fascination--a film where the enticing question is who is in danger, and in what way.

I saw a review that compared this film to The Lighthouse, and while it's not at that level, it does give you a sense of what the pace is like. It's the kind of film where the label "horror" probably does more harm than help. (Though I have to say that there were two different moments that totally shocked me and some wonderfully disgusting and disturbing imagery.)

Speaking of imagery, I honestly had to admire the in-your-face visuals that spoke unambiguously to sex. The main character never puts his fist through a Georgia O'Keeffe painting, but it's close. In less assured hands, it could come off as misogynistic (you know, around the time a character is reaching into a suggestively slit open fish) or parody. But the way that the film walks the line between female vulnerability and femme fatale, the imagery feels more like something to be decoded. Likewise, the dialogue walks that double edge. What does it mean for a woman to tell a male character, "You're a good man". What is her motivation? What does it mean for a man to tell a female character a variation on the old classic, "I'm not going to hurt you"? The actions of the male and female characters mirror and echo each other until the usual signals about victims and perpetrators in horror become totally scrambled.

This is not a great horror film, and it certainly has its weak points. There's an exposition dump toward the end that dings the pace, and there's a denouement that leans way too heavy-handed. But there's no way it deserves so many low votes. If Garai writes or directs another horror film, I will definitely check it out. There was too much excellent weirdness for her to go under the radar.