Amelia’s Children

Amelia’s Children

I don’t know how “Amelia’s Children,” a Portuguese horror comedy about an inquisitive wife, her oblivious husband and his strange family, will go down with genre fans. The movie is funny but mostly at the expense of its characters and their Freudian hang-ups. It’s the quasi-gothic setup here that’s amusing, and it’s as convoluted as it is simple. That, plus a perverse streak of humor, puts “Amelia’s Children” over the top, though it never gets quite ha-ha hard enough to be satirical or sincere enough to be campy.

Ryley (Brigette Lundy-Paine) uncovers an incestuous and maybe supernatural plot when her credulous husband Ed (Carloto Cotta) pays a visit to his decrepit and estranged mother Amelia (Anabela Moreira). Which is funny because Ryley is freaked out by Amelia’s botched plastic surgery, and Manuel (also Cotta), the son whose hair hangs to his shoulders and who wears cowboy boots for no reason well, there might be something or someone in their basement.

In that way “Amelia’s Children” is both familiar and not. Maybe you’ve seen something like it lately say, the gross-out AirBnB shape-shifter “Barbarian” or maybe you’ve seen something like it not so recently: Stuart Gordon’s great American pervert classic “Castle Freak.” Or maybe you saw “Diamantino,” a kitschy 2018 character study/fantasy about a very dumb man (Cotta) who unwittingly becomes a symbol for Portuguese fascism; it was a breakthrough (and feature debut) for co-director Gabriel Abrantes, who also wrote and directed “Amelia’s Children.” The fact that Cotta plays three roles here seems to wink at the already initiated.

“Amelia’s Children” is a superficially dignified old dark house picture whose secrets are never more interesting than its cast’s chemistry and timing. Awkward silences are filled with overwrought exchanges, which are then punctuated by deadpan stares and inappropriate outbursts. It’s pulpy and winking, and I can’t tell if it’s for everyone. But “Amelia’s Children” is still poised enough grotesque enough to be charming, even when it doesn’t appear to be pulling anyone’s leg at all.

The funniest way to explain the humor in “Amelia’s Children” would be to call it conceptual, because the situation is the punchline, and it’s often delivered with a straight face. You have to notice how these people frequently accidentally highlight their absurdity in context, but rarely so much as to break from genre conventions altogether. The film opens with a flashback to an earlier child snatching incident at a gothic villa. Then we flash-forward to the present, where Ed mindlessly sticks his finger into a mysterious Smartphone app accessory called a “gene reader.” Nothing seems weird there.

Ed is using an app called AnceStory because he was abandoned as an infant and now wants to find out about his family. Ryley supports her partner and goes with him when he travels to claim his mother, his twin brother and his unclaimed baggage. Ryley has this real easy way of talking to Ed in these establishing scenes mainly she back and forths with him like when they’re sitting at a café and she tries to use a language translator app to order a creamy codfish dish, just fit in (“You’re gonna have the creamiest wettest fish,” she teases; it’s umai).

The ellipsis between Ryley’s words matters more than their intended meaning, like when Ryley first meets Amelia and her new mother-in-law suggests that Ryley should paint her portrait. This is only funny if you enjoy watching young women squirm when they’re cornered by their mothers-in-law who’ve had too much work done.

“I love to pose,” Amelia says. Her face doesn’t move or read right.

“Well I love drawing so” says Ryley before an awkward laugh and short pause “ perfect pair”.

The movie’s slippery tone might be frustrating for viewers who expect Abrantes’ humor to be more aggressive or grisly; given good Abrantes is at slightly over-inflating the psychosexual subtext of his characters’ obviously messed-up relationships. But “Amelia’s Children” never feels like a one-note joke. It’s the same joke, about Ed’s naïve search for his roots being obviously wrongheadedness, only it’s funny because Ryley sees his story become what it clearly always was. To the deluded, it’s a fairy tale; to the skeptical, it’s a horror movie.

Horror fans will probably get “Amelia’s Children,” even though it might not be to everyone’s taste. There are a couple of unnerving and/or gross standout moments like when Ryley snoops on Amelia with her translator app, and her phone says, on her mother in law’s behalf, “She’s listening.” There are also these funny hiccup-sized gags scattered throughout like when Amelia launches into a laughably heavy reverie “Time eats us like potatoes.” and Ryley does her best to feign nonchalance: “Well, it’s so nice to meet you.”

Abrantes could have taken bigger swings; but the ones he and his collaborators attempt here are still disarming for being both unusually timed and comically well-punctuated.

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