Mark Reviews Movies: THE ACCURSED (2022)

The Accursed, Screen Media Films

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | October 13, 2022

"Don't come inside until the screaming starts," a mother tells her young daughter at the beginning of The Accursed. That's a doozy of an opening line, but the promise of this generic and dilly-dallying movie is pretty much downhill from there.

The premise involves a demon that finds itself trapped inside the body of an older woman, locally known as a witch, during that prologue. We meet Mary Lynn (Alexis Knapp) and her silent daughter (played by Ava McAvoy), lurking outside a small cabin the woods somewhere, carving a cross into a nearby tree, and having that briefly suggestive line about the screaming. Mary Lynn has come calling on Ms. Ambrose (Meg Foster) with a vial of blood, which she hopes to use in some kind of ritual that will infect the blood's former owner with demonic possession.

It's all a trick, though, and screenwriter Rob Kennedy probably should have called it a day after arriving at a bit of situational irony, as the witch is undone by her own ritual. The case could be made that the Kennedy did call it a day after that, considering how little happens over and over again during the course of the rest of this story.

Sometime later, we meet Elly (Sarah Grey), a nurse who has returned home from volunteering in Haiti after the death of her mother. There for support is her best friend Beth (Sarah Dumont, a tough, no-nonsense, and practical breath of fresh air amidst a lot of predictable stupidity), who insists that Elly should pack up the mother's things as quickly as possible, get back to her life without the clearly negative influence of the woman, and try to forget about all of the vague suggestions of whatever troubled relationship Elly had with her mother.

Obviously, Elly doesn't listen, or there'd be no story here. Inside the house, she starts hearing her mother's favorite song, playing on an old record player no matter how many times she stops it (Beth suggests she should pack it away or, better, break the damn vinyl, but no, Elly doesn't listen to that, either), and soon enough, she starts hearing the mother's voice and dreaming about mom hanging from the door.

Elly does leave the house, which is good. She goes to an even more ill-advised place, though, which is both necessary and pretty tough to believe under the circumstances. A woman named Alma (Mena Suvari) calls, saying that she tried to reach Elly a week ago, only for her mother to say the woman should call back in a week when her daughter would be home. None of this eeriness fazes Elly in the slightest, and neither does Alma's insistence that Elly's mother said she'd take a job caring for a sickly older woman nor that the infirmed woman is located in a cabin in the middle of nowhere nor that there's no cell service and she can't have Beth stay as company.

For all of this creepy setup, which strains credulity and our ability to be on the protagonist's side, the rest of the story keeps following the same, anticlimactic pattern. We already know the sick woman—Ms. Ambrose from the prologue, obvious—has a demon inside her, so the rest of the plot mostly amounts to waiting for it to emerge—hand-first from the woman's mouth—at some point when Elly goes to check on her patient.

Elly does so repeatedly and with, basically, the same result repeated over and over again. Sometimes the woman's eyes open in front of Elly, and sometimes they open solely for our benefit when she leaves the room. Other times, the hand exits the mouth as Elly sleeps next to the bed, and others still, Elly thinks nothing of the distinctly unnatural vomit that she has to clean from Ms. Ambrose's mouth. Elly doesn't think much here, but when she does, it's usually nothing. Director Kevin Lewis' staging and editing rely on a similarly predictable pattern.

Meanwhile, Beth continues to attempt to convince her friend to leave and even goes so far as to find solid evidence as to why she should. There's a back story here, beyond the events of the prologue and having to do with a couple of philandering fathers and demonic deals, but if it makes any sense, it doesn't matter. The Accursed builds toward a final standoff that we could see coming from miles away, even if the movie didn't so incompetently tease us with it as often as possible.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products