THE CURSED (2021)

Studio: LD Entertainment
Director: Sean Ellis
Writer: Sean Ellis
Producer: Pete Shilaimon, Mickey Liddell, Sean Ellis
Stars:    Boyd Holbrook, Kelly Reilly, Alistair Petrie, Roxane Duran, Nigel Betts, Stuart Bowman, Simon Kunz, Amelia Crouch, Max Mackintosh, Tommy Rodger

Review Score:

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Summary:

After slaughtering an encampment of gypsies, a small countryside community becomes cursed by a supernatural beast in 1882.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Following a brutal WWI battle at the Somme in 1917, a doctor removes multiple bullets, including one made of silver, from Edward Laurent. Edward returns home to his family’s manor to recuperate. Edward’s older sister Charlotte also comes to the manor to check on her brother’s worsening condition.

As children 35 years earlier, Charlotte and Edward eavesdrop on their wealthy landowner father Seamus Laurent as Seamus meets with other elders from their countryside settlement. Due to a territorial dispute, Seamus and the elders plot to hire mercenaries to threaten a group of gypsies who have claimed shared ownership of nearby land.

At their encampment, a gypsy woman instructs a gypsy blacksmith to fashion metal teeth out of silver coins. The woman then performs a magic ritual to seal a werewolf curse inside the set of silver teeth.

Following a failed negotiation, the mercenaries slaughter the gypsies and set fire to their camp. The mercenary captain orders his men to make an example out of the gypsy woman and her blacksmith. The mercenaries hack off the blacksmith’s limbs and turn him into a scarecrow. The woman is buried alive in a body pit while reciting an invocation.

Pathologist John McBride comes to the settlement. Local constable Alfred Moliere overhears John asking about gypsies.

The settlement’s children, including Charlotte and Edward, start suffering from the same nightmare of the scarecrow and the silver teeth. Timmy Adams leads the rest of the children into the woods to confront their nightmare by digging up the teeth. Timmy feels strangely compelled to put the teeth in his mouth. Timmy undergoes a mild metamorphosis before suddenly biting Edward’s throat. The children scatter in a panic.

Charlotte screams for her father, who rushes Edward back to the manor. A doctor diagnoses Edward with an infected wolf bite. Honoring a vow the children made, Charlotte doesn’t tell anyone what really happened.

Edward disappears from his bed. When a search party finds no sign of the boy in the forest, Seamus contacts Alfred Moliere for official assistance. Alfred asks John to join him since the pathologist asked about gypsies and Seamus recently had a related encounter.

Charlotte and Timmy meet in the church to discuss what happened. Timmy tells Charlotte he stashed the teeth in the church so they would be on hallowed ground. For protection, Timmy gives a Bible page to Charlotte and keeps one for himself as they conclude the teeth were made from the 30 pieces of silver Judas received for betraying Jesus.

A vision of Edward draws Timmy into the woods. A creature mauls Timmy to death.

Upon its discovery, John examines Timmy’s body and finds the torn Bible page that mentions silver. Alfred dismisses Timmy’s death as a wolf attack so he can return his attention to a cholera epidemic. John agrees to remain at the manor while continuing to investigate the case.

John suffers from the same scarecrow nightmare, except he sees the scarecrow entrancing his dead wife and daughter. John and Seamus plot with the elders to hunt the creature after it tries to break into the fortified manor during the night.

Household laborers Anne-Marie, Jakob, and Calum work in the field. The creature kills Jakob. Anne-Marie gets bitten too, but Calum sacrifices himself to the beast so she can get away.

Anne-Marie vanishes just like Edward did. Recognizing that Seamus and his people appear to be being hunted, John recommends that the townspeople barricade themselves inside the church. Meanwhile, Anne-Marie undergoes a transformation.

John tells Seamus’s wife Isabelle about how his wife and daughter were killed by a beast that slaughtered 13 people in their village. The community blamed a curse. Shortly afterward, a band of traveling gypsies came and claimed that since the curse had its revenge, it could now be contained in silver. Isabelle begins telling John about the slaughtered gypsies, but Seamus sternly cuts her off.

John sets a trap that allows him to capture and kill one of the beasts. With Seamus and other elders as onlookers, John cuts open the carcass to find Anne-Marie alive inside. However, Anne-Marie remains in a feral state of transformation. At John’s urging, an elder shoots Anne-Marie to destroy her.

John asks Seamus about the shared dream of the gypsy woman buried in the field. John warns that she cursed the land and the Laurent family specifically. John further warns that everyone who survives an attack will suffer a transformation until the curse has exacted revenge for stealing the land.

With Seamus resistant to confronting the truth, John and Isabelle talk to Charlotte to find out what was in the field. Charlotte shows them the Bible page Timmy gave her while confirming her belief that the silver originally belonged to the apostle Judas. John asks for the silver teeth, which Charlotte brings him from the church. John has a blacksmith turn the teeth into silver bullets.

A beast mauls another maid, Anais. Anais returns to the manor, but tells no one about her injuries.

Anais later transforms into a creature and attacks Seamus. Seamus overturns a candle that sets the manor on fire. Seamus shoots Anais. While Isabelle gets Charlotte out of the burning house, John follows Seamus to another building. John watches a repentant Seamus immolate himself for causing the curse.

John, Isabelle, and Charlotte join everyone barricaded in the church. John advises waiting until daylight before trying to draw out the creature and shoot it with a silver bullet.

While everyone else sleeps, Isabelle hears pleas from her son that compel her to open the barricaded door. The creature enters the church and begins ripping through everyone. After the beast attacks Isabelle, John shoots it with a silver bullet. Isabelle dies. The creature transforms back into Edward.

With their parents dead, John ends up adopting Charlotte and Edward. 35 years later in 1917, Charlotte comforts Edward as he lies dying in his bed.

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Review:

I was initially pretty skeptical about “The Cursed.” After premiering to mixed reactions under the title “Eight for Silver” at Sundance 2021, the film faded away for a bit, reportedly to undergo a nip/tuck that might speed up the heat on its slow burn suspense. When it returned under its new title a year later, “The Cursed” curiously chose to play only in theaters, despite VOD debuts becoming the new norm in a post-pandemic world.

I hadn’t heard a whole lot of noise for the film ahead of its wide release, although I did see a poster pop up on a nearby bus shelter normally reserved for big blockbusters like “Spider-Man: Far from Home.” Marketing was evidently in motion, even if that was the only instance that made it to my eyes. Trailers may have been pushing it too, except “The Cursed” still seemed like a mid-tier thriller oddly suited for theatrical exclusivity since it didn’t come from a major studio. Not helping to discredit that notion was a release date that went head-to-head with Netflix’s much-ballyhooed “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (review here), a fierce rival guaranteed to eat up all of horror fandom’s attention during that opening weekend.

“The Cursed” also takes place in English countryside circa 1882 and clocks in at almost two hours. Taking everything together, including a pair of WWI bookends, outward appearances essentially had “The Cursed” shaping up to be a period piece snoozer anxious to disappear quickly with the film distribution equivalent of an Irish goodbye.

New reviews kept raving about it though. Some fans appeared excited to support the movie simply because it was a rare theatrical release for indie horror. What finally moved the needle on my curiosity was seeing someone liken “The Cursed” to a classic Hammer horror production. I’m stretching a bit to make an original analogy, but one might even similarly describe “The Cursed” as what a Universal Monster movie could look like with a 21st-century arthouse approach. Strip out the B-movie cheesiness of bug-eyed performances and Saturday matinee melodrama with painted soundstage backdrops. Keep the werewolf curse, gypsies (the term used in the movie), constables and vicars, tight-knit old town, torches, foggy forests, and horse-drawn carriages and what remains is a quietly creepy chiller.

If we’ve learned anything from “Drag Me to Hell’s” Mrs. Ganush, it’s that Hell hath few furies like an old gypsy woman scorned. When a land dispute turns ugly, community elders led by a wealthy manor master solve their problem by hiring murderous mercenaries to lay waste to a gypsy camp. Cruelly making an example out of them, one gypsy has his limbs hacked off so he can be turned into a scarecrow. Another gypsy becomes buried alive in a body pit, although not before she releases the curse contained in a set of silver teeth fashioned from the coins Judas received for betraying Jesus.

The settlement soon becomes beset by a beast. Most of the men attribute the attacks to a wolf. John McBride believes the culprit is a different creature altogether. A pathologist who tragically lost his wife and daughter to similar circumstances, John has come to town to investigate a suspicion of something more sinister than a wild animal. Setting up shop in the landowner’s mansion, John embarks on an investigation to uncover the truth before the monster in the woods slaughters any additional villagers.

Even though it traffics mainly in mood, “The Cursed” isn’t entirely on par with the “elevated” horror of an exclusively atmospheric A24 production. Most of its meanderings are relegated to amplifying gloomy environments, not musing on mundane millennial ennui. Scattered instances of action-intensive gore also intermittently pull it back into midnight movie territory.

But “The Cursed” can still be called a prim-and-proper scary movie. If “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is the boisterous bad kid barking from the back of the classroom, then “The Cursed” is a boarding school preppy who plays first chair violin. Certain temperaments will encounter difficulty in dealing with that starched-shirt stuffiness the longer it drags on. Those attuned to this type of gothic terror on the other hand, will become draped in the elegantly eerie dread of its sophisticated style.

Regardless of how ticklish anyone’s fancy is for the film, some of the suspicions seeded by initial skepticism do bear a few prickly pieces of fruit. It seems unavoidable for any movie with this make-up. Particularly in the fattier portions of its patiently paced midsection, “The Cursed” ambles through several sleepier spells and gets caught up in negligible sequences in need of an editor’s knife. It’s not designed for attention-grabbing intensity. Yet when the horror hits, “The Cursed” connects with quick bites of carnage that accent the drama with realistic stakes that are more frightful than fantastical.

“The Cursed” will find an appreciative audience, to be sure. That audience won’t have a high membership rate, certainly not on par with the popularity of a more mainstream movie. But between the lush visual scope of the scenery (horses on fire!) and the substance in its story, “The Cursed” can still pimple susceptible skin with goosebumps.

Review Score: 65

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