Amelia’s Children loads its one genuine idea into a single scene, which arrives predictably just as things ramp up for the third act, and otherwise, writer/director Gabriel Abrantes allows the rest of this absurd but utterly familiar horror story to coast on the unrealized potential. That idea is as shocking as things get in Abrantes’ screenplay, and it’s a pretty good one, tied to a desperate search that becomes patently obvious once we meet the seeker in question. Abrantes’ film is simply uninterested or unable to explore it in any real sense, except in the periphery of the actual story. The only aspect that slightly elevates it above the disappointing returns on our investment is the trio (or, perhaps, quartet, although the distinction is tricky) of genuinely enjoyable performances at the movie’s center.
There is also the disorienting opening sequence, set quite far into the movie’s past, as a woman’s (Alba Baptista) infant child is abducted from right under her nose by a pair of masked home invaders. This sequence seems out of character with the immediate jump forward in time, as we meet Ed (Carloto Cotta) and Riley (Brigette Lundy-Paine), a dating couple from New York who have arrived in Portugal on something of a journey of self-discovery for Ed. He was a foster child and moved from home to home without any idea of his roots or identity. Now, though, someone claiming to be a distant relative has reached out to meet him in person. Obviously, Ed was one of the abducted children, and Manuel (also played by Cotta) is his previously unknown twin brother.
Manuel has a simple and enticing offer: for Ed and Riley to accompany him back to the family mansion (an absolutely colossal space, fit for royalty in a long-ago century) to meet their birth mother, played under a mountain of makeup prosthetics by Anabela Moreira. The nature of those prosthetics – that they represent the heavy plastic surgery undertaken by this woman – is the first clue that something is amiss about her, and then the rest of the movie, in which certain relationships are revealed to be of the worst kind of taboo, confirms our suspicions about what’s really going on here. The movie, of course, is told from the perspective of Riley, an inactive participant and passive observer of all the weirdness.
To that end, Lundy-Paine is a solid, sympathetic presence, even as their character eventually devolves into a bit of a horror-movie trope. The real story of the movie’s performances are the exceptionally odd and multifaceted turns from Moreira, whose obsession with a certain type of existence is convincingly inhuman and insane when necessary, and Cotta, who is equally convincing at developing two very different men. Ed and Manuel’s only similarity is their facial appearance, as the latter’s head of hair and foppish dialect are both amusingly over-the-top. These are performances from a very different movie than the unfortunately self-serious and repetitive one that made it to screens.
Most of that movie is devoted to scare set-ups and payoffs that are entirely familiar within the horror genre, from shots of characters passed in the forefront of the frame while the lead(s) is looking elsewhere, to an extended sequence that is revealed to be a dream (and another in which is a nightmare is revealed to have been within another dream), to the anticlimactic final showdown, which just turns to a loss of gross-out violence. Amelia’s Children has a certain appeal in its performances and premise, but it never reveals itself to have genuine ambition.
Photo courtesy of Magnet Releasing
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