Amulet is the feature film debut of director Romola Garai, who has an acting career going back to the early 2000s. The story centres on the relationship between Tomas, who has left behind his war-torn home country to eke out a living in London, and Magda, a mysterious young woman who lives with her sick, mad mother in a crumbling old house. The mother is locked away upstairs and Tomas is brought in by a kindly nun to help maintain the house and provide some companionship for Magda.
Tomas is traumatised by a crime he committed in the war. Unable to forgive himself, he stays out on the edge of society; he studies philosophy to keep himself sane. Magda seems to be equally trapped, living with a violent, deranged parent in an endless stalemate of co-dependency. Tomas sinks deeper and deeper into the household until he is trapped by more than his own guilt. Something has been tracking him ever since he dug up a small statuette in a forest back home and is now ready to claim him. His existential crisis ends with him becoming Magda's slave as she reveals herself to be the embodiment of the statuette, the Amulet that finds the evil in a man's heart and uses it to fuel its own existence.
Amulet is a film that forces its audience to work a bit too hard to understand it. Almost everything in the story provokes questions and any number of answers. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does feel like a film that keeps its audience at arm's length and is ambiguous to the point of frustration.
The direction is consistent and steady, the film is well-constructed, and the cinematography partners the direction well in creating the tone and disquieting atmosphere throughout. The main cast are all good enough to carry the film through its slow pace, Alec Secareanu is especially good as Tomas, a doomed man who finds an even deeper doom waiting for him in Wandsworth, home of demons and fake nuns.
