amelia’s children

Thanks to a DNA test, Edward, who grew up in an orphanage, finally learns the truth about his bio- logical family. With his girlfriend Ryley he heads to rural Portugal to meet it. The huge mansion, in which his sickish old mother and his twin brother live, quickly turns out to be a dark labyrinth in which the past is more present than ever. But only Ryley seems to notice the increasingly bizarre behaviour of Edward's relatives and their almost manic cheerfulness. Worried, she investigates and discovers long-buried secrets told reluctantly by the villagers.

Director Gabriel Abrantes has closely studied his role models. In this atmospheric homage to classic European genre cinema, he renounces to cheap special effects and jump scares, and uses instead a sophisticated interplay between camera, lighting and bloody, grotesque masks to create a shocker that literally gets under your skin.