I\u2019m not really sure how genre fans will respond to \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children,\u201d a Portuguese horror comedy about a suspicious wife, her clueless husband, and his creepy family. \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d is funny, but the jokes are usually on its characters and their Freudian anxieties. It\u2019s the quasi-gothic scenario that\u2019s amusing here, and it\u2019s as fraught as it is straight-forward. That and a perverse sense of humor puts \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d over the top, though it\u2019s never quite ha-ha hard enough to be satirical, nor sincere enough to be campy.<\/p>\n
Ryley (Brigette Lundy-Paine) stumbles onto an incestuous and possibly supernatural conspiracy when her gullible husband Ed (Carloto Cotta) visits his decrepit and estranged mother Amelia (Anabela Moreira). Which is funny, because Amelia\u2019s botched plastic surgery makes Ryley uncomfortable, and her other son, Manuel (also Cotta), has long hair and wears cowboy boats, and oh yeah, there might be something or someone in their basement. <\/p>\n
In that sense, \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d both is and isn\u2019t unusual. Maybe you\u2019ve seen something recent like it, like the gross-out AirBnB shape-shifter \u201cBarbarian,\u201d or something less current, like the great American pervert Stuart Gordon\u2019s \u201cCastle Freak.\u201d Or maybe you\u2019ve just seen \u201cDiamantino,\u201d a kitschy 2018 character study fantasy about a very dim man (Cotta) who unintentionally becomes the poster child for Portuguese fascism. \u201cDiamantino\u201d was a breakthrough (and the debut feature) for co-director Gabriel Abrantes, who also wrote and directed \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children.\u201d The fact that \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d also features Cotta in three roles also seems to wink at the already initiated. <\/p>\n
\u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d is a superficially restrained old dark house movie whose secrets are never more compelling than its cast\u2019s chemistry and comedic timing. Awkward silences are filled with precisely overheated exchanges, and then punctuated by deadpan expressions and inappropriate outbursts. It\u2019s pulpy and cheeky, and I don\u2019t know if I can recommend it to everyone. \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d is still poised and grotesque enough to be charming, even when it doesn\u2019t seem to be messing with audiences at all. <\/p>\n
Maybe the best way to describe the humor in \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d would be to call it conceptual, since the scenario is the joke, and it\u2019s often pitched with a straight face. You have to pay attention to the way these characters often inadvertently call attention to their circumstantial ridiculousness, but rarely so much as to completely break from genre conventions. The movie starts with a flashback to an earlier incident involving child abduction and a gothic villa. Then we flash-forward to the present, where Ed thoughtlessly jams a finger into a mysterious Smartphone app accessory called a \u201cgene reader.\u201d Nothing suspicious there, right? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I\u2019m not really sure how genre fans will respond to \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children,\u201d a Portuguese horror comedy about a suspicious wife, her clueless husband, and his creepy family. \u201cAmelia\u2019s Children\u201d is funny, but the jokes are usually on its characters and their Freudian anxieties. It\u2019s the quasi-gothic scenario that\u2019s amusing here, and it\u2019s as fraught as …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[48,47],"class_list":["post-1121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-horror-movies","tag-horror","tag-mystery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}