Mark Reviews Movies: THE CURSED

The Cursed, LD Entertainment

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 17, 2022

The supernatural terror of The Cursed has little on the grounded, real-world horror that sets the plot in motion. To be sure, those two elements of writer/director Sean Ellis' movie are connected, meaning that we never fully lose sight of the violence, injustice, and barbarism that begin this tale. Still, it's more than a bit disappointing to watch this condemnation of the cruelty beneath society's upper crust so quickly transform into a fairly standard creature feature.

A prologue, set during the Great War, offers a bit of horrific reality (searing gas in the trenches and a hospital tent where amputated appendages are casually tossed into buckets) and the mystery of what's inside a wounded officer's torso (The scene eventually returns in the end, although the answer to its inclusion is pretty clear by that point, while Ellis stops short of making the flash-forward in time mean something to the story's theme). The main tale takes place three decades prior, on and near a sizeable estate, near a settlement, in a secluded part of France. The family of four who live there have an idyllic, if emotionally stunted, way of life.

That's threatened when a traveling group of Roma people arrive to the countryside, claiming that a plot of land, shared by the wealthy elite of the area, actually belongs to them. The elders of the region, including patriarch of the aforementioned family Seamus Laurent (Alistair Petrie), privately acknowledge that the Roma clan is in the right. Fearing what it could mean to them, the elders decide to hire mercenaries to scare away the visitors.

Ellis' filmmaking eventually turns toward a more traditional vein of horror, with scenes of suspense breaking into sudden reveals of monstrous figures, but this scene and its immediate follow-up remain the most striking and dreadful in the entire movie. The mercenaries enact of massacre of the Roma camp, which Ellis captures in an unbroken static shot from atop a distant hill. Screams echo from the tents, as gunshots crack the chilled air and flames spread through the camp. Occupying most of the frame, the slaughter proceeds for such a considerable amount of time that it decimates any sense of help or hope, and the finale of the mass murder, which features a pair of torturous killings, only puts a shocking punctuation on the awful matter.

The rest of the plot begins when some local kids, including the two children of Seamus and his wife Isabelle (Kelly Reilly), begin having similar nightmares and, later, find a jaw filled with silver teeth buried near the secret mass grave. A young boy from the settlement, seemingly possessed by some unnatural force, uses the teeth to bite Edward (Max Mackintosh), the Laurents' younger child and brother to Charlotte (Amelia Crouch). When Edward disappears and the momentarily possessed boy is killed by what seems to be a wild animal, John McBride (Boyd Holbrook), a pathologist who has arrived at the settlement looking for the group of Roma, sticks around to determine what beast is killing the locals and to hunt the creature.

Compared to the ruthless depiction of appalling prejudice and the abject brutality that comes as a direct result of it, a monster feels downright quaint in terms of frightening ideas and images here. Ellis basically undermines his own story's potential with this dramatic shift of intention, method, and theme, but despite that, there is some occasional cleverness and real skill on display in the ways the filmmaker toys with a familiar monster and stages some sequences of building terror.

In case the silver wasn't hint enough, the beast here is essentially a werewolf. Its targets are Seamus and the elders, as well as their kin—a force of unstoppable and ever-spreading vengeance. As per usual, a single bite results in the victim's inevitable transformation, but here, the creature is a pale, hairless thing of lean frame and with a particularly ferocious visage (The visual effects used to create the monsters are obvious, but Ellis is smart enough, both in terms of creating tension and understanding the technical limitations here, to show the beasts in short doses). There's a particularly diabolical alteration to our usual understanding of a werewolf, in that creature itself is akin to a shell—a prison for its helpless host.

All of this unfolds in a pretty expected manner, as John puts together the clues and tries to protect the remaining innocent Laurents, Seamus assembles a hunting party, and the monsters get closer and closer to finding a way of getting to the leader of the massacre and his family. Ellis clearly cares more about atmosphere than character in this tale, if the general absence of any development or personality for many of the players here is any indication (John gets a tragic back story that's connected to supernatural bloodbath, and that's about it). For what the filmmaker is trying to do with story of creeping doom, it's enough, for the most part.

Even so, the attempt itself feels limited, especially within the context of how and why the preternatural scare machine begins moving. At its core, The Cursed is a horror story about intolerance, abusive power, and cruelty, and in gradually caring more about its familiar monsters and superficial scares, Ellis also and increasingly loses sight of that true and real sense of horror.

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