Film review: Belfast

published 4 February 2022

The actress Romola Garai’s directorial debut is a “moody, brooding” horror film that inches from “slow-boil creaks to rapturous, hallucinogenic madness”, while delivering a few good jump scares along the way, said Mark Kermode in The Observer; “an encounter with something horrible in the bathroom gave me a genuine start”. The Romanian actor Alec Secareanu stars as Tomaz, a veteran “from an unnamed, conflict-torn country”, now making ends meet in squalid London. When he meets a “sinisterly smiling nun”, Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton), she offers him refuge in a dilapidated suburban house, where he can live as long as he helps to repair the building. He accepts, and ends up enclosed in the house with Magda (Carla Juri), a fellow resident who’s taking care of her disabled mother. Gradually, the house becomes “a character with its own distinctive pulse”, whose “mouldy walls mirror a creeping moral malaise within”.

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The first hour of Amulet is admirably chilling, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday. But “as the bumps in the attic grow progressively more alarming”, Garai gets into a “terrible tangle” with an overcomplicated plot “involving demons, deities and eternal damnation”. I found this “chamber-horror oddity” weird and wonky, agreed Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. Amulet could have brought a “bracingly ambitious” feminist twist to the genre. Yet the pacing is “askew” and the dialogue stilted – and the “berserk” ending unleashes a series of twists that upend “all the power dynamics we’d previously been fed”. You’ll leave confused, which is hardly ideal.