AMULET – Semi-arthouse take on the occult about a solider whose life on sentry-post duties in the Balkans was disrupted by the arrival of a refugee and the appearance of an amulet. Adrift in London, he ends up in a strange household where a woman tends to her mysterious, attic-bound mother. Things get progressively weirder after the solider starts a relationship with daughter and starts to find bats in toilets etc. It’s hard to balance split narratives, but the two strands of ‘Amulet’ unravel elegantly enough – maybe a bit too elegantly, it’s a very slow and poised film and it can’t quite get beyond a slight ponderousness. Perhaps I was looking for something more stylistically oblique; that said, the imagery and atmospherics gradually simmer up a nicely claustrophobic feeling and build to a conclusion that makes a bizarre but not unwelcome leap into sci-fi body horror territory. A baffling pay-off for some maybe, but a satisfying end to a slow burn that might just get under your skin. Interesting debut and worth checking.
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