Amulet REVIEW: Romola Garai makes directing debut with slow-burning guessing game

Instead of fancy frocks and flouncy hats, she’s tasked her art department with fashioning scary monsters and explosions of gore.

Garai appears to be more influenced by Lynch and Cronenberg than Dickens or Austen. While she creates a couple of moments worthy of those “body horror” maestros, you wish she’d paid more attention to the classics when constructing her fatally muddled script.

Alec Secareanu plays Tomas, a former soldier from a central European war zone whose haunted memories play out in flashback.

Now he’s a refugee labourer working illegally in London and sleeping in a derelict factory.

But his luck appears to change when he runs into a nun called Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton) who offers him a room in the crumbling suburban house where Magda (Carla Juri) is caring for her terminally ill mother.

Tomas’s first job is to patch up the ceiling and sort out some astonishingly dodgy plumbing. But, while he warms to the seemingly naive Magda, he becomes increasingly suspicious of the inhuman noises coming from the mysterious old woman’s room in the attic.

Garai is aiming for one of those slow-burners that keep us watching by keeping us guessing. If you expect your audience to play that game for an hour and a half, you need to reward them with a decent pay off.

Amulet’s annoyingly opaque final act suggests we are supposed to keep guessing on our bus rides home.