There is something uniquely unsettling about the premise of Amelia’s Children (2023) — and I say that as someone who has actually been on the other side of it. Finding family through DNA testing is a genuinely strange experience, one that sits somewhere between miracle and rupture, and when I heard that this Portuguese-set horror film centered on exactly that premise, I was in before the trailer finished. Because I have been there, having found a father, sister and aunt in the same manner, I was intrigued.
In this film, a man believing himself and orphan discovers his biological family through a DNA test, travels to meet them, and weirdness ensues. On paper, it is the kind of high-concept horror that should practically write itself. The mind can conjure any of a million ways this would be thriller or horror movie gold.
In practice, Amelia’s Children is a film that consistently gets in its own way. The pacing in the first two acts is a sustained test of patience, and not the slow-burn kind that pays dividends, but the kind that feels less like deliberate restraint than uncertain direction. The plot is muddier than it has any right to be, and the editing, rather than clarifying the story’s more elliptical moments, compounds the confusion. The flashback sequences are a particular problem as many of them appear and disappear without resolution or explanation, fragments that seem to promise meaning and then simply evaporate. At a certain point you realize the film is not being cryptic on purpose. It is just not finishing its sentences.
The lighting is another frustration of the same kind. Horror cinematography lives and dies by the quality of its darkness. Shadow should feel intentional, charged, threatening. Here, too often, it is simply…DARK.
Dark in the way that makes you reach for the remote, rewind fifteen seconds, and say wait, did something just move? Is something supposed to be there?, and not in a way that rewards the rewinding. When you cannot tell whether an image is sinister or merely poorly lit, the film has already lost the argument it was trying to make.
What saves Amelia’s Children from being a total loss is its third act, which does finally find a gear it should have been in much earlier, and the performance of Jack Haven playing the lead’s girlfriend, who is the film’s most valuable and underutilized asset. She brings a genuine emotional range to a role that could easily have been thankless You feel the vertigo of her situation, the roller-coaster of loyalty and dread and disbelief and her work makes you wish the film around her were sharper.
Two and a half stars: a promising premise, a luminous supporting performance, and a third act that arrives about forty minutes too late to fully redeem what came before.