Sundance review: Chilling atmosphere of 'Amulet' puts premium on dread over shocks

‘Amulet’

★★★

Playing in the Midnight section of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 100 minutes.

Screens again: Tuesday, Jan. 28, 11:30 a.m., Prospector (Park City); Thursday, Jan. 30, 11:30 a.m., The MARC (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 11:59 p.m., Tower (Salt Lake City).

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Mixing a brooding atmosphere and a sly feminist spin on the horror genre, “Amulet” is a solid statement debut for actor-turned-filmmaker Romola Garai.

Tomaz (Alec Secareanu) is a homeless immigrant in London, finding odd jobs in construction — when a kindly nun (Imelda Staunton) finds him work as a live-in handyman in a rundown house. Living in the house are Magda (Carla Juri), a lonely young woman who cooks and cleans, and Magda’s ill mother, living unseen in the attic.

Tomaz is urged never to venture upstairs, even when he hears what sounds like Magda being abused, verbally and physically, by her mother. The longer he lives there, the more Tomaz becomes attracted to Magda — but a guilty secret from his past, when he was a soldier at a wartime border post in some unnamed country, weighs on his conscience.

Garai (you may remember her as the adult Saoirse Ronan in “Atonement,” or as Diego Luna’s dance partner in “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights”) has a good eye for creepy detail, and every spot of mildew or peeled paint in Magda’s house adds to a feeling of festering rot. She doesn’t traffic in cheap jump scares, preferring to build the dread gradually — that is, until some cunning twists in the final half hour that pack a gut-punch. 

“Amulet” shows that Garai knows what she’s doing behind the camera, and I’m curious to see what she does next.