‘Amelia’s Children’ Review: An Uneven Family Affair
If modern movie-making has taught us anything, it’s that there is always more intellectual property to be mined if you know where to look. Even, it turns out, within a fictional painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya. The painting in question here—titled “The Portuguese Witch”—seems to be a twist on Goya’s far more real, and iconic, painting “Saturn Devouring His Son” and, just like that painting, features a disquieting bit of filicide. This horrifying image seems to be the jumping-off point for writer/director Gabriel Abrantes’ newest feature Amelia’s Children, an unnerving and uneven tale of a secluded Portuguese witch and her undying quest for immortality, beauty, and a new dance partner.
After a distressing and largely opaque prologue, we meet our protagonists Ed (Carloto Cotta) and Riley (Brigette Lundy-Paine). Ed has just received bad news; though the foster home was able to track down his records, there is no concrete information on his parentage, or even his date of birth. Via AnceStory, a DNA reader that promises to get to the bottom of Ed’s mysterious lineage, information that eventually leads Ed and Riley to Ed’s twin, Manuel, a palazzo in the forested hills of rural Portugal, and, eventually, to Amelia herself. Efficiency is essential in a story like this and, to the film’s credit, we arrive at this dark, sprawling mansion with little delay, the stakes and mood set quickly.
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From there, Amelia’s Children walks a bit of a tightrope between discomfort and farce. It takes almost no time to identify Manuel and Amelia as genuine eccentrics at best and maniacal zealots at worst. Manuel (also played by Cotta) carries himself like some sort of forgotten rockstar, hair flowing as he sashays around the mansion’s dimly-lit halls, saying ridiculous things in a near-operatic tone. Amelia, on the other hand, is something much more perplexing. Played by Anabela Moreira under extensive prosthetics, Ed and Manuel’s mother appears to us first as a bed-bound, sickly woman with, as Ed put it, “a little too much work done.”
From the moment the three of them sit on her bed, we get a clear sense of some haunted, doomed triangle forming here, one that promises to leave Riley on the outside looking in, even as Amelia never misses an opportunity to “appreciate” Riley’s youth and beauty.
Some of these early scenes are genuinely difficult to watch, not for overt horror, but for the way they consistently unsettle our sense of reality. Conversations are stilted, questions left to dangle in the thick air between what amounts to strangers. As the outsider, Riley is, in many ways, the audience’s surrogate and the first to question what exactly is going on within the walls of this strange, isolated mansion. There are times when Abrantes’ script threatens to tip over into something a little too campy for its own good. Almost no one is acting quite human within the world of Amelia’s Children, so even as the film introduces its most supernatural elements and extensive local lore, we are left with a slippery grasp of reality.
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It’s here that Lundy-Paine, the rising young actor set to star in the highly-anticipated I Saw The TV Glow later this year, sets themselves apart from the rest of the cast who at times struggle to maintain the razor’s edge tone the movie is striving for. As things progress, Riley becomes our de facto hero. Watching her navigate this house of horrors is never as exhausting as it could be in less capable hands.
Eventually, the tension that Abrantes establishes so deftly through the first two-thirds of the film finally snaps. Your enjoyment of the movie as a whole will probably rely on whether the many stabs of the knife land successfully. There’s a lot coming at us in the movie’s properly deranged conclusion, and while not all of it is as engaging as you might hope, there are a few moments of genuine revulsion. “The Portuguese Witch” may not be a real painting, but there are images in Amelia’s Children that will remain etched in your brain for some time, for better or worse.
Summary
There are images in Amelia’s Children that will remain etched in your brain for some time, for better or worse.
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