Part of SFFILM Festival
Amulet
Description
“Evil must be contained,” says Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake), but trying to achieve that proves challenging in actress Romola Garai’s gory and hypnotic horror film. The wickedness Claire has in mind is a being that lives in the attic of a nondescript English house. When she recruits Tomaz (Alec Secareanu), a homeless refugee from the Yugoslav Wars, to help contain the entity, the young man’s troubled past may be informing her choice. With its mind-bending narrative, Amulet joins the ranks of other recent heady fright fests like Hereditary and Us.
“The horror genre can be a very powerful vehicle for exploring challenging, often timely themes and topics in a riveting fashion. Weaving those concepts into a narrative in a blunt manner could certainly work well, but what makes Romola Garai’s feature directorial debut especially effective and unforgettable is how those ideas sneak up on you. Amulet sucks you in, challenges you to try to put things into focus and then smacks you with a wallop of an ending that’ll leave you needing a few moments after the credits.” –Perri Nemiroff, Collider
Long-time screen, stage, and television actress Romola Garai made her writing-directing debut with Scrubber (2012), a short. Amulet is her first feature.
“I’d always been a big fan of horrors. They’re some of my favorite films. I think when I started out, because I’d never acted in a horror film and I work as an actor, I had maybe not considered it primarily so I’d been writing scripts that were largely dramas. Then I was really inspired by the move by a lot of female filmmakers into the genre space… I really thought maybe this is where I should be going.” –Romola Garai, Deadline
Film Details
Language English
Year 2019
Runtime 99
Country UK
Director Romola Garai
Producer Matthew James Wilkinson, Maggie Monteith
Writer Romola Garai
Editor Alastair Reid
Cinematographer Laura Bellingham
Music Sarah Angliss
Cast Carla Juri, Alec Secareanu, Imelda Staunton
Print Source
AMP
timo@amp-film.comhttps://www.amp-film.com/films/outside.html
