AMELIA'S CHILDREN - Mark Reviews Movies

Amelia's Children, Magnet Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 29, 2024

Once it becomes patently clear what's happening in Amelia's Children, writer/director Gabriel Abrantes' horror movie might have become unsettling in a most sordid way. The major problem—beyond how long the filmmaker delays that revelation and fills the time beforehand with material that's too predictable, as well as silly, to be scary—is the absence of any subtlety to both the build-up and the payoff. We can see what's actually happening here well before the main characters do, and after the fact, Abrantes relies entirely on cheap shocks and scares.

Ultimately, the movie is intended to shock, so in a way, it succeeds at that goal on a fundamental level. On the other hand, the real shock is how badly Abrantes ruins the suspense of the mystery in the first two acts, by leaving us with only one logical possibility of the answer, and miscalculates the impact of the third act, by loading it with so many elements that the key one almost feels like an afterthought.

The opening sequence turns out to be the movie's best, because it understands a thing or two about creating atmosphere and generating mystery without hitting us over the head with those intentions. Take the first shot, which flies over a dense forest in Portugal, passes by a hill, and discovers an isolated manor, sitting still and ancient in the darkness in the middle of those woods. The image evokes much with little, and so, too, does the rest of the sequence, which follows a young woman (played by Alba Baptista) in her nightly routine caring for twin babies.

It's interrupted by a home invasion, as two intruders sneak through the mansion and attempt to abduct the infants. They escape with one. Well, one of them escapes with a single baby, and the other is left to some unknown fate when the mother's eyes roll in the back of her head, surely unleashing some sort of horror.

Thirty-some years later, Ed (Carloto Cotta) lives in New York City with his girlfriend Riley (Brigette Lundy-Paine). He was a foster child, and after contacting the group home where he was raised, Ed learns that there's no record of his biological parents or even his actual date of birth. Riley buys him an ancestry test for—what he now has learned—is likely not his birthday, and quickly, there's a familial match with a man living in Portugal.

Let's skip to the obvious, because, yes, Ed was the kidnapped baby and this man Manuel (also Cotta, donning a wig and a manner that are so distinct from his other character that it's a pretty good joke, whether or not it's meant to be) is his long-lost twin brother. Their mother Amelia is still alive and still living with Manuel in that mansion.

In one of those moments where a character trusting his instincts would probably save a lot of trouble but cut the story short, he admits to Riley that he finds his birth mother a bit eerie. As played by Anabela Moreira, she is, mostly because the actress' face is caked in so much makeup and layered with so many prosthetics. The idea is that Amelia has undergone a lot of plastic surgery to look younger. The result, though, is so over-the-top that the ensuing hints that maybe Amelia might be up to no good are rendered as redundant as that description.

The question, of course, is what no-good the woman is up to. The answer more or less comes from a local woman (played by Rita Blanco), who practically curses the couple for daring to go to the mansion and explains some awful happenings there about a year before the prologue. The rest of it has to do with how close Amelia is to Manuel and how close she wants to be to Ed, and let's just leave the rest to the imagination, which is some advice Abrantes might have considered for most of what happens during the extended climax.

Getting to all of this is more of a chore in horror than an exercise in one. Riley wanders around the mansion, looking for clues about her boyfriend's family, and is continuously startled by someone lingering nearby, some shape around the corner, and a nightmare that turns out to be that shoddiest of horror gimmicks—a dream within a dream. Eventually, she catches up to what we suspect, and the rest is either too gross to describe or too predictable to need to describe it.

Some of Amelia's Children is laughable enough to wonder if that's partially Abrantes' goal with the material. The rest of it is poorly executed enough not to put too much thought into the notion.

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