AMELIA’S CHILDREN (2023)

Streaming on Hulu!
Directed/Written by Gabriel Abrantes.
Starring Carloto Cotta, Brigette Lundy-Paine, Anabela Moreira, Alba Baptista, Rita Blanco, Beatriz Maia, Nuno Nolasco, Valdemar Santos
Check out the trailer here!!

Ed (played by Carloto Cotta) has always felt a hole in his life not knowing who his birth parents were. But after his girlfriend Riley (I SAW THE TV GLOW’s Brigette Lundy-Paine) gets him an ancestry test, Ed discovers that he was abducted as a child and has a long lost family in Portugal. So Ed and Riley head to a small villa in the middle of a forest in Portugal to meet his twin brother Manuel (also played by Cotta) and his mother Amelia (Anabela Moreira). But the longer Ed and Riley stays with the family, the more Ed becomes enamored with them and the more Riley becomes freaked out by their strange ways, like how Manuel and Amelia sleep in the same bed. It comes to be that their sleeping habits are not the strangest secrets the family hold.

AMELIA’S CHILDREN is a wonderfully perverse little movie. Sporting a modest budget and some truly horrifyingly uncomfortable moments of familial creepiness. While I won’t reveal them here, there are some moments in this movie that will truly make your toes curl and this family is close…very close, and desperately want Ed to join in the fun. This is definitely going to be too much for some to take, but I found it refreshing to see that there still are perverse places for horror to go after all of these years.

Adding to the creep factor is the way the aged matriarch Amelia looks. Seems she is very fond of plastic surgeries and has undergone quite a few of them through the years to stay young, leaving her with a face that is stretched in some places, puffy in others. This is a truly horrifying prosthetic Anabela Moreira wears, making Amelia look iconic and otherworldly. The sad thing is, there really are actresses out there who have done this to their faces—many of them gorgeous women who could have aged gracefully, but instead to go the Frankenstein route. Moreira is a true standout in this all-important and all-together ooky title role, giving the character much depth past the bad plastic surgery, slow and stiff movements, and unblinking eyes.

Brigette Lundy-Paine as Riley is another great performance as she seems to be the only one who is looking at this bizarre situation realistically. While the role of the hysterical woman who isn’t taken seriously by anyone is a cliché in modern horror, AMELIA’S CHILDREN at least places the horror onto Ed and has Riley simply trying to slap some reality into him, rather than suffering all of the horror herself. As Manuel, Carloto Cotta does a top drawer job of making him seem overly friendly at first and truly taboo-breaking and wretched by the end. The way he dances in a late scene in the movie is reminiscent of that Jean Claude Van Damme dancing meme, but Cotta pulls it off making it even more creepy than JCVD. Unfortunately, Cotta as Ed is less effective, more of a pushover, and easily manipulated, making him a character you can’t help but disrespect and not care for. Ed’s oblivious nature to the strangeness going on is the chink in this film’s acting armor. The actor Cotta is fine and has an Oscar Isaac feel to his look and cool delivery. But the Ed character feels underdeveloped.

There is a plot hole that is never addressed where Ed is encouraged to sign a document written in Portuguese that he has no idea of its contents. This story beat is brought up once and forgotten later on down the line, but AMELIA’S CHILDREN does culminate in a truly strange, bloody, and icky little ending that makes up for this fumble. While it isn’t perfect, I found AMELIA’S CHILDREN to be a nightmarishly fun and wickedly wrong little horror. If you look to horror for unease and discomfort, reminiscent of the creepy old people vibe conveyed in Ti West’s X, then this weird little movie is going to be just your kind of sickness.