Amulet, review: Imelda Staunton, demons and vampire bats do not a sensible horror make

Whatever we might have expected Romola Garai to bring us in her writing-directing debut, it can’t have been Amulet. This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

A ex-soldier called Tomaz, played heroically by God’s Own Country’s Alec Secăreanu, has come to England as a refugee-day labourer, after escaping near-total solitude in some kind of Eastern European warzone, where he was a border guard in a thick forest. Beset by PTSD and living in a homeless shelter, he’s offered succour by a nun called Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton), who offers heaps of stilted dialogue and a place for him to go.

This decrepit hovel has two residents, one of them a rampaging madwoman whose dismal groans we hear in the attic, and her ostensible daughter Magda (Carla Juri), a curious wench who makes dishes out of indeterminate minced meat, and seems to have coped remarkably with the putrid state of the building. There’s something very wrong with the plumbing, though, and the huge bite marks on her arm don’t bode well.

En route to a climax of ravenous rat babies, male pregnancies and pagan apparitions, we find ourselves installed (and struggling) in a particular zone of clapped-out English Gothic, whose mildewed tone and flourishes of cosmic horror have a certain correlation with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series.

In theory, with a wicked feminist slant to add to that mode, Amulet could have been bracingly ambitious stuff. But Garai’s hold on the pace is askew, and her ideas – including the amulet itself, a buried charm found by Tomaz which suggests higher entities have got his number – don’t fit together in a convincing way.

Any escalating sense of demonic threat in the house is undermined by a cross-cut storyline from the country Tomaz has escaped. Back there, he was the one with a shack to offer Miriam, a runaway war widow played well (if almost needlessly so) by the Greek actress Angeliki Papoulia. Their scenes, unfortunately, are drab filler, wading through workaday anguish before we get to any point.

The ending unleashes a series of twists, rearranging all the power dynamics we’d previously been fed: no one is exactly who they claimed to be, and an infernal punishment is in the offing. Previously suspected demons are in fact prisoners of a different sex. Staunton whips out a cigarette holder and laughs off her earlier scenes. Vampire bats in the U-bend suddenly seem like the most innocuous denizens of the residence.

Garai wants to force a reckoning with inner evil and turn the tables to expose it. You wouldn’t call the confrontation “frightening”, exactly; “squishy”, sure, or “berserk”. With a more assured ending, Amulet could have laid its earlier confusions to rest, but it throws a heap more into the mix. To fill the shoes of the horror master Dario Argento is a goal worth aiming for, and no one would want to discourage Garai from trying to pull out all the stops. It’s just not the same as jamming down every key on the organ simultaneously.

15 cert, 99 min. Dir: Romola Garai. In cinemas from Friday