Whatever we might have expected Romola Garai to bring us in her writing-directing debut, it can’t have been Amulet. This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

A ex-soldier called Tomaz, played heroically by God’s Own Country’s Alec Secăreanu, has come to England as a refugee-day labourer, after escaping near-total solitude in some kind of Eastern European warzone, where he was a border guard in a thick forest. Beset by PTSD and living in a homeless shelter, he’s offered succour by a nun called Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton), who offers heaps of stilted dialogue and a place for him to go.

This decrepit hovel has two residents, one of them a rampaging madwoman whose dismal groans we hear in the attic, and her ostensible daughter Magda (Carla Juri), a curious wench who makes dishes out of indeterminate minced meat, and seems to have coped remarkably with the putrid state of the building. There’s something very wrong with the plumbing, though, and the huge bite marks on her arm don’t bode well. 

En route to a climax of ravenous rat babies, male pregnancies and pagan apparitions, we find ourselves installed (and struggling) in a particular zone of clapped-out English Gothic, whose mildewed tone and flourishes of cosmic horror have a certain correlation with Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series.

In theory, with a wicked feminist slant to add to that mode, Amulet could have been bracingly ambitious stuff. But Garai’s hold on the pace is askew, and her ideas – including the amulet itself, a buried charm found by Tomaz which suggests higher entities have got his number – don’t fit together in a convincing way.